Barack Obama has styled himself a centrist, but does his record support that

claim?

In this series, we examine Senator Obama's past, his voting record and the people
who've served as his advisers and mentors over the years. We'll show how the
facts of Obama's actions and associations reveal a far more left-leaning tilt to his
background — and to his politics.

Part One

Barack Obama's Stealth Socialism

Election '08: Before friendly audiences, Barack Obama speaks passionately about
something called "economic justice." He uses the term obliquely, though,
speaking in code — socialist code.

Part Two

Obama's Global Tax

Election '08: A plan by Barack Obama to redistribute American wealth on a global
level is moving forward in the Senate. It follows Marxist theology — from each
according to his ability, to each according to his need.

Part Three

Obama Wants You

Election '08: Barack Obama calls it "Universal Voluntary Public Service." We call it
a plan for national involuntary servitude. Kennedy asked us what we could do for
our country. Obama has ways to make us volunteer.

Part Four

Obamanomics Flunks The Test

Election '08: Barack Obama the lawyer-organizer could use a crash course in
economics. His economic plan's assumptions, based on long-discredited Marxist
theories, are wildly wrongheaded.
Part Five

Young Obama's Red Mentor

Election '08: The mainstream media have finally gotten around to revealing
Barack Obama's early mentor. But they've downplayed the mystery man's
communist background.

Part Six

Obama Finds An ACORN

Election '08: The man who includes being a community organizer on his short
resume has a long association with a far-left group that would organize our
communities into socialist gulags.

Part Seven

Reparations By Another Name

Election '08: Barack Obama says Washington shouldn't just offer apologies for
slavery, but also "deeds." Don't worry, he says, he's not talking about direct
reparations. Relieved? Don't be.

Part Eight

Obama's Little Red Schoolhouse

Schools: While Obama's children enjoy the best education money can buy, he
wants to deny inner-city children the education change we can believe in —
school choice. He prefers cradle-to-diploma collectivist education.

Part Nine

Obama's Radical Roots And Rules

Election '08: Most Americans revile socialism, yet Barack Obama's poll numbers
remain competitive. One explanation: He's a longtime disciple of a man whose
mission was to teach radicals to disguise their ideology.
Part Ten

Like Father, Like Son

Election '08: Barack Obama's economic blueprint sounds like one his communist
father tried to foist on Kenya 40 years ago, with massive taxes and succor
shrouded as "investments."

Part Eleven

Finding Friends On Far, Far Left

Election '08: The saying that a man is known by the company he keeps is true of
political relationships. In Barack Obama's case, some of the groups that support
him are an indictment of his political orientation.

Part Twelve

Alice In Obamaland
Election '08: One of the "lies" Barack Obama says are being told about him is
quite true. It involves a staunch admirer of the Soviet Union and its communist
society who helped launch Obama's political career.

Part Thirteen

Michelle's Boot Camps For Radicals

Election '08: Democrats' reintroduction of militant Michelle Obama in Denver was
supposed to show her softer side. But it only highlighted a radical part of her
resume: Public Allies.

Part Fourteen

Sojourning Socialists
Election '08: Barack Obama has joined forces with a white socialist he calls a
"good friend" — the Rev. Jim Wallis, founder of "Sojourners." He too believes in
"liberation theology," sans the black nationalism. In fact, Wallis is the white
version of Jeremiah Wright, sans the black rage.
Part Fifteen

Community Organizer In Chief

Election '08: Barack Obama claims he worked for a "small group of churches" as a
community organizer. In fact, he was hired by a radical Alinskyite group, and Saul
Alinsky's own son has outed him.

Part Sixteen

How Obama Applies Alinsky's Rules

Election '08: Barack Obama's mocking of John McCain, while urging his followers
to "get in their face," are tactics right out of his radical hero Saul Alinsky's
playbook: ridicule and agitation.

Part Seventeen

Chicago Commune
Election '08: Barack Obama summed up well the perversity of Democratic Party
thinking when he told Fox News' Bill O'Reilly that it is "neighborliness" for
Washington to hike taxes on those who are "sitting pretty."

Part Eighteen

Obama's McKnight In Shining Armor

Election '08: Obama needed help getting into Harvard Law School. He got it from
a disciple of Saul Alinsky who shared the socialist agitator's belief in the radical
change the young community organizer could embrace.

Part Ninteen

If Bailout Plan Is Too Socialistic, Just Wait For Obama Leviathan

Election '08: Have Americans been so lulled by Barack Obama's smooth talk that
they don't realize his plans would expand government into a massive socialist
behemoth? His is a soft-spoken, hard-left agenda.
Part Twenty

Ayers Has Not Left Radicalism Behind

Election '08: Bill Ayers isn't out bombing anymore, but he's never stopped being
a radical. His ties to hostile Marxist regimes remain, raising more questions about
Barack Obama's refusal to fully repudiate him.

Part Twenty-One

Defining Problems With Socialism For The Post-Cold War Generation

Election '08: John McCain has finally called Barack Obama's agenda by its proper
name. But if he assumes voters understand what he means when he uses the
word "socialism," he assumes too much.
Barack Obama's Stealth Socialism
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Monday, July 28, 2008 4:20 PM PT

Election '08: Before friendly audiences, Barack Obama speaks passionately about
something called "economic justice." He uses the term obliquely, though,
speaking in code — socialist code.

IBD Series: The Audacity Of Socialism

During his NAACP speech earlier this month, Sen. Obama repeated the term at
least four times. "I've been working my entire adult life to help build an America
where economic justice is being served," he said at the group's 99th annual
convention in Cincinnati.
And as president, "we'll ensure that economic justice is served," he asserted.
"That's what this election is about." Obama never spelled out the meaning of the
term, but he didn't have to. His audience knew what he meant, judging from its
thumping approval.
It's the rest of the public that remains in the dark, which is why we're launching
this special educational series.
"Economic justice" simply means punishing the successful and redistributing their
wealth by government fiat. It's a euphemism for socialism.
In the past, such rhetoric was just that — rhetoric. But Obama's positioning
himself with alarming stealth to put that rhetoric into action on a scale not seen
since the birth of the welfare state.
In his latest memoir he shares that he'd like to "recast" the welfare net that FDR
and LBJ cast while rolling back what he derisively calls the "winner-take-all"
market economy that Ronald Reagan reignited (with record gains in living
standards for all).
Obama also talks about "restoring fairness to the economy," code for soaking the
"rich" — a segment of society he fails to understand that includes mom-and-pop
businesses filing individual tax returns.
It's clear from a close reading of his two books that he's a firm believer in class
envy. He assumes the economy is a fixed pie, whereby the successful only get rich
at the expense of the poor.
Following this discredited Marxist model, he believes government must step in
and redistribute pieces of the pie. That requires massive transfers of wealth
through government taxing and spending, a return to the entitlement days of
old.
Of course, Obama is too smart to try to smuggle such hoary collectivist garbage
through the front door. He's disguising the wealth transfers as "investments" —
"to make America more competitive," he says, or "that give us a fighting chance,"
whatever that means.

Among his proposed "investments":

• "Universal," "guaranteed" health care.
• "Free" college tuition.
• "Universal national service" (a la Havana).
• "Universal 401(k)s" (in which the government would match contributions
made by "low- and moderate-income families").
• "Free" job training (even for criminals).
• "Wage insurance" (to supplement dislocated union workers' old income
levels).
• "Free" child care and "universal" preschool.
• More subsidized public housing.
• A fatter earned income tax credit for "working poor."
• And even a Global Poverty Act that amounts to a Marshall Plan for the
Third World, first and foremost Africa.
His new New Deal also guarantees a "living wage," with a $10 minimum wage
indexed to inflation; and "fair trade" and "fair labor practices," with breaks for
"patriot employers" who cow-tow to unions, and sticks for "nonpatriot"
companies that don't.
That's just for starters — first-term stuff.
Obama doesn't stop with socialized health care. He wants to socialize your entire
human resources department — from payrolls to pensions. His social-
microengineering even extends to mandating all employers provide seven paid
sick days per year to salary and hourly workers alike.
You can see why Obama was ranked, hands-down, the most liberal member of
the Senate by the National Journal. Some, including colleague and presidential
challenger John McCain, think he's the most liberal member in Congress.
But could he really be "more left," as McCain recently remarked, than self-
described socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (for whom Obama has openly
campaigned, even making a special trip to Vermont to rally voters)?
Obama's voting record, going back to his days in the Illinois statehouse, says yes.
His career path — and those who guided it — leads to the same unsettling
conclusion.
The seeds of his far-left ideology were planted in his formative years as a
teenager in Hawaii — and they were far more radical than any biography or
profile in the media has portrayed.
A careful reading of Obama's first memoir, "Dreams From My Father," reveals that
his childhood mentor up to age 18 — a man he cryptically refers to as "Frank" —
was none other than the late communist Frank Marshall Davis, who fled Chicago
after the FBI and Congress opened investigations into his "subversive," "un-
American activities."
As Obama was preparing to head off to college, he sat at Davis' feet in his Waikiki
bungalow for nightly bull sessions. Davis plied his impressionable guest with
liberal doses of whiskey and advice, including: Never trust the white
establishment.
"They'll train you so good," he said, "you'll start believing what they tell you
about equal opportunity and the American way and all that sh**."
After college, where he palled around with Marxist professors and took in
socialist conferences "for inspiration," Obama followed in Davis' footsteps,
becoming a "community organizer" in Chicago.
His boss there was Gerald Kellman, whose identity Obama also tries to hide in his
book. Turns out Kellman's a disciple of the late Saul "The Red" Alinsky, a hard-
boiled Chicago socialist who wrote the "Rules for Radicals" and agitated for social
revolution in America.
The Chicago-based Woods Fund provided Kellman with his original $25,000 to
hire Obama. In turn, Obama would later serve on the Woods board with terrorist
Bill Ayers of the Weather Underground. Ayers was one of Obama's early political
supporters.
After three years agitating with marginal success for more welfare programs in
South Side Chicago, Obama decided he would need to study law to "bring about
real change" — on a large scale.
While at Harvard Law School, he still found time to hone his organizing skills. For
example, he spent eight days in Los Angeles taking a national training course
taught by Alinsky's Industrial Areas Foundation. With his newly minted law
degree, he returned to Chicago to reapply — as well as teach — Alinsky's
"agitation" tactics.
(A video-streamed bio on Obama's Web site includes a photo of him teaching in
a University of Chicago classroom. If you freeze the frame and look closely at the
blackboard Obama is writing on, you can make out the words "Power Analysis"
and "Relationships Built on Self Interest" — terms right out of Alinsky's rule
book.)
Amid all this, Obama reunited with his late father's communist tribe in Kenya, the
Luo, during trips to Africa.
As a Nairobi bureaucrat, Barack Hussein Obama Sr., a Harvard-educated
economist, grew to challenge the ruling pro-Western government for not being
socialist enough. In an eight-page scholarly paper published in 1965, he argued
for eliminating private farming and nationalizing businesses "owned by Asians
and Europeans."
His ideas for communist-style expropriation didn't stop there. He also proposed
massive taxes on the rich to "redistribute our economic gains to the benefit of
all."
"Theoretically, there is nothing that can stop the government from taxing 100%
of income so long as the people get benefits from the government
commensurate with their income which is taxed," Obama Sr. wrote. "I do not see
why the government cannot tax those who have more and siphon some of these
revenues into savings which can be utilized in investment for future
development."
Taxes and "investment" . . . the fruit truly does not fall far from the vine.
(Voters might also be interested to know that Obama, the supposed straight
shooter, does not once mention his father's communist leanings in an entire
book dedicated to his memory.)
In Kenya's recent civil unrest, Obama privately phoned the leader of the
opposition Luo tribe, Raila Odinga, to voice his support. Odinga is so committed
to communism he named his oldest son after Fidel Castro.
With his African identity sewn up, Obama returned to Chicago and fell under the
spell of an Afrocentric pastor. It was a natural attraction. The Rev. Jeremiah
Wright preaches a Marxist version of Christianity called "black liberation
theology" and has supported the communists in Cuba, Nicaragua and elsewhere.
Obama joined Wright's militant church, pledging allegiance to a system of "black
values" that demonizes white "middle classness" and other mainstream pursuits.
(Obama in his first book, published in 1995, calls such values "sensible." There's
no mention of them in his new book.)
With the large church behind him, Obama decided to run for political office,
where he could organize for "change" more effectively. "As an elected official," he
said, "I could bring church and community leaders together easier than I could as
a community organizer or lawyer."
He could also exercise real, top-down power, the kind that grass-roots activists
lack. Alinsky would be proud.
Throughout his career, Obama has worked closely with a network of stone-cold
socialists and full-blown communists striving for "economic justice."
He's been traveling in an orbit of collectivism that runs from Nairobi to Honolulu,
and on through Chicago to Washington.
Yet a recent AP poll found that only 6% of Americans would describe Obama as
"liberal," let alone socialist.
Public opinion polls usually reflect media opinion, and the media by and large
have portrayed Obama as a moderate "outsider" (the No. 1 term survey
respondents associate him with) who will bring a "breath of fresh air" to
Washington.
The few who have drilled down on his radical roots have tended to downplay or
pooh-pooh them. Even skeptics have failed to connect the dots for fear of being
called the dreaded "r" word.
But too much is at stake in this election to continue mincing words.
Both a historic banking crisis and 1970s-style stagflation loom over the economy.
Democrats, who already control Congress, now threaten to filibuster-proof the
Senate in what could be a watershed election for them — at both ends of
Pennsylvania Avenue.
A perfect storm of statism is forming, and our economic freedoms are at serious
risk.
Those who care less about looking politically correct than preserving the free-
market individualism that's made this country great have to start calling things by
their proper name to avert long-term disaster.
Obama's Global Tax
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Tuesday, July 29, 2008 4:20 PM PT

Election '08: A plan by Barack Obama to redistribute American wealth on a global

level is moving forward in the Senate. It follows Marxist theology — from each
according to his ability, to each according to his need.

IBD Series: The Audacity Of Socialism

We are citizens of the world, Sen. Obama told thousands of nonvoting Germans
during his recent tour of the Middle East and Europe. And if the Global Poverty
Act (S. 2433) he has sponsored becomes law, which is almost certain if he wins in
November, we're also going to be taxpayers of the world.
Speaking in Berlin, Obama said: "While the 20th century taught us that we share a
common destiny, the 21st has revealed a world more intertwined than at any
time in human history."
What the 20th century really showed was a series of totalitarian threats — from
fascism to Nazism to communism — defeated by the U.S. military. Hitler's
Germany, Mussolini's Italy, Tojo's Japan and the Soviet Union offered destinies we
did not share.
Our destiny of peace and freedom through strength was not achieved by a
transnationalist fantasy of buying the world a Coke and singing "Kumbaya."
Obama's Global Poverty Act offers us a global socialist destiny we do not want,
one that challenges America's very sovereignty. The former "post-racial"
candidate obviously intends to be a post-national president.
A statement from Obama's office says: "With billions of people living on just
dollars a day around the world, global poverty remains one of the greatest
challenges and tragedies the international community faces. It must be a priority
of American foreign policy to commit to eliminating extreme poverty and
ensuring every child has food, shelter and clean drinking water."
These are worthy goals, but note there's no mention of spreading democracy,
expanding free trade, promoting entrepreneurial capitalism or ridding the world
of despots who rule and ravage countries such as Zimbabwe and Sudan.
Obama would give them all a fish without teaching them how to fish. Pledging to
cut global poverty in half on the backs of U.S. taxpayers is a ridiculous and
impossible goal.
His legislation refers to the "millennium development goal," a phrase from a
declaration adopted by the United Nations Millennium Assembly in 2000 and
supported by President Clinton.
It calls for the "eradication of poverty" in part through the "redistribution (of)
wealth of land" and "a fair distribution of the earth's resources." In other words:
American resources.
It's a mantra of liberals that the U.S. is only a small portion of the world's
population yet consumes an unseemly portion of the planet's supposedly finite
resources. Never mentioned is the fact that America's population, just 5% of the
world's total, also produces a stunning 27% of the world's GDP — to the
enormous benefit of other countries. Nonetheless, their solution is to siphon off
the product of our free democracy and distribute it.
We already transfer too much national wealth to the United Nations and its
busybody agencies. Obama's bill would force U.S. taxpayers to fork over 0.7% of
our gross domestic product every year to fund a global war on poverty, spending
well above the $16.3 billion in global poverty aid the U.S. already spends.
Over a 13-year period, from 2002, when the U.N.'s Financing for Development
Conference was held, to the target year of 2015, when the U.S is expected to
meet its part of the U.N. Millennium goals, we would be spending an additional
$65 billion annually for a total of $845 billion.
During a time of economic uncertainty, the plan would cost every American
taxpayer around $2,500.
If you're worried abut gasoline and heating oil prices now, think what they'll be
like when the U.S. is subjected in an Obama administration to global energy
consumption and production taxes. Obama's Global Poverty Act is the
"international community's" foot in the door.
The U.N. Millennium declaration called for a "currency transfer tax," a "tax on the
rental value of land and natural resources," a "royalty on worldwide fossil energy
production — oil, natural gas, coal . . . fees for the commercial use of the oceans,
fees for the airplane use of the skies, fees for the use of the electromagnetic
spectrum, fees on foreign exchange transactions, and a tax on the carbon content
of fuels."
Co-sponsors of S. 2433 include Democrats Maria Cantwell of Washington, Dianne
Feinstein of California, Richard Durbin of Illinois and Robert Menendez of New
Jersey. GOP globalists supporting the bill include Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and
Richard Lugar of Indiana.
Lugar has worked with Obama to promote more aid to Russia to promote nuclear
nonproliferation. Lugar also promotes the Law of the Sea treaty, which turns over
the world's oceans to an International Seabed Authority that would charge us to
drill offshore and have veto power over the movements and actions of the U.S.
Navy.
Obama's agenda sounds like defeated 2004 Democratic candidate John Kerry's
"global test" for U.S. foreign policy decisions where "you have to do it in a way
that passes the test — that passes the global test — where your countrymen,
your people understand fully why you're doing what you're doing and you can
prove to the world that you did it for legitimate reasons."
Obama has called on the U.S. to "lead by example" on global warming and
probably would submit to a Kyoto-like agreement that would sock Americans
with literally trillions of dollars in costs over the next half century for little or no
benefit.
"We can't drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72
degrees at all times . . . and then just expect that other countries are going to say
OK," Obama has said. "That's not leadership. That's not going to happen."
Oh, really? Who's to say we can't load up our SUV and head out in search of
bacon double cheeseburgers at the mall? China? India? Bangladesh? The U.N.?
In an Obama White House, American sovereignty will become an endangered
species. The Global Poverty Act is the first toe in the water of global socialism.
Obama Wants You
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Thursday, July 31, 2008 4:20 PM PT
Election '08: Barack Obama calls it "Universal Voluntary Public Service." We call it
a plan for national involuntary servitude. Kennedy asked us what we could do for
our country. Obama has ways to make us volunteer.

IBD Series: The Audacity Of Socialism

Sen. Obama's call to public service is quite different from JFK's. JFK knew America
was already a nation of givers and volunteers, perhaps the most charitable and
altruistic nation on Earth. Entities such as the Peace Corps would give Americans
an outlet for their kindness and generosity, an opportunity to share what the
freest nation on Earth had given them. Obama will force you to share.
Obama's Orwellian use of the words "universal" and "voluntary" together is an
indicator of an antithesis to capitalist society deeply rooted in his socialist
associations, education and training. Indeed, in 1996, when he ran for an Illinois
state Senate seat, one of his first endorsements was from the Chicago branch of
the Democratic Socialists of America.
On the surface, his plan looks just like typical bureaucratic program growth. He
wants to expand Americorps to 250,000 slots and double the size of the Peace
Corps. He'll create a Clean Energy Corps to plant trees and otherwise save the
Earth. It's how Obama plans to fill those slots that's worrisome.
Announcing his plan July 2 at the University of Colorado, he said: "We will ask
Americans to serve. We will create new opportunities to serve. And we will direct
that service to our most pressing national challenges." He will make us an offer
we can't refuse.
Obama says that as president he will "set a goal for all American middle and high
school students to perform 50 hours of service a year, and for all college students
to perform 100 hours of service a year." What he doesn't say is that he'll make
such voluntarism compulsory by attaching strings to federal education dollars.
The schools will make the kids volunteer. It's called plausible deniability.
In a commencement speech at Wesleyan University, Obama advised graduates
not to pursue the American dream of success, but to serve others.
"You can take your diploma, walk off this stage and chase only after the big
house and the nice suits and all the other things that our money culture says you
should," he told the graduates. "But I hope you don't."
Don't be another Bill Gates and amass a fortune making people more productive
and successful in their daily lives and giving your countrymen a standard of living
the world will envy. Exchange your cap and gown for sackcloth and ashes. Leave
your possessions behind and come and follow Obama.
"Fulfilling your immediate wants and needs betrays a poverty of ambition," he
opined. Shame on us for being selfish and buying that SUV built by an
autoworker trying to fulfill his family's immediate wants and needs.
"Our collective service can shape the destiny of this generation," Obama said.
"Individual salvation depends on collective salvation."
We already have a Salvation Army that is truly a volunteer organization. Collective
service and salvation is not a classic definition of voluntarism. What Obama has in
mind is to turn America into a socialist version of the old Soviet collectives.
And if your idea of service is to join the military and keep others alive and free,
forget about it. And never mind about ROTC on campus.
Obama has no place for those who are willing to abandon fame and fortune to
lay down their lives for their friends and ours. "At a time of war," Obama says, "we
need you to work for peace."
"We left corporate America, which is a lot of what we're asking young people to
do," Obama's wife, Michelle, told a group of women in Zanesville, Ohio, during
the primaries. "Don't go into corporate America. . . . Become teachers. Work for
the community. Be social workers. Be a nurse. Those are the careers we need, and
we're encouraging people to do just that."
Don't be the engineers who will figure out better ways to extract shale oil from
the porous rock that holds it. Figure out how to extract more money from
taxpayers' wallets.
But the Obamas are doing more than "encouraging" or "asking." In a speech in
California, Michelle, who has made a small fortune in the "helping industry," said:
"Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed
your cynicism. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your
comfort zone. . . . Barack Obama will never allow you to go back to your lives as
usual — uninvolved, uninformed."
But America is not a nation of selfish, self-serving people. Social demographer
Arthur Brooks once calculated that Americans volunteered 32% more than
Obama's beloved Germans. We also donate seven times more money to charities
and causes than the Germans who gathered in Berlin.
In talking about his national service, Obama, the man who seems to be running
for "community organizer in chief," also made this startling statement:
"We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national
security objectives we've set. We've got to have a civilian national security force
that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded."
This is an idea worthy of Hugo Chavez.
Northwestern University law professor James Lindgren has estimated that this
civilian national security force alone would cost somewhere between $100 billion
and $500 billion, or between 10% and 50% of all federal tax receipts. And that
doesn't include the cost of the brown shirts.
Adults are not exempt from all this, even adults who've already served in the U.S.
military. "People of all ages, stations and skills will be asked to serve," Obama
says. Will they be asked, or drafted?
"The future of our nation depends on the soldier at Fort Carson," he concedes.
"But it (also) depends on the teacher in East L.A., the nurse in Appalachia, the
after-school worker in New Orleans . . ." So drop down and give Sgt. Obama 50
hours.
Require. Demand. Never allow. Obama's version of "voluntary" service is more
appropriate for Havana than middle America. He wants to turn America's
students, and even adults, into clones of Elian Gonzalez, compelled to serve the
state in ways Obama "will direct."
Correction: In the first installment of this series on Tuesday, the Luo ethnic group
in Kenya was identified as "communist." The father of the Luo leader cited,
Oginga Odinga, did espouse the post-colonial African version of communism in
the 1970s and '80s, and his son, Raila Odinga, calls himself a social democrat. But
communism as an ideology did not characterize the entire tribe.
Obamanomics Flunks The Test
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Friday, August 01, 2008 4:20 PM PT
Election '08: Barack Obama the lawyer-organizer could use a crash course in
economics. His economic plan's assumptions, based on long-discredited Marxist
theories, are wildly wrongheaded.

IBD Series: The Audacity Of Socialism

In arguing for a heavier mix of government, he assumes that capitalism unfairly

favors the rich, almost exclusively so, and fails to spread prosperity.
"The rich in America have little to complain about," he carps. "The distribution of
wealth is skewed, and levels of inequality are now higher than at any time since
the Gilded Age."
Obama cites data showing a yawning gap between the income of the average
worker and the wealthiest 1%. He thinks it's government's job to step in and
close it — "for purposes of fairness" — by soaking the rich, among other leftist
nostrums.
"Between 1971 and 2001," he complains, "while the median wage and salary
income of the average worker showed literally no gain, the income of the top
hundredth of a percent went up almost 500%."
But such a snapshot comparison would be meaningful only if America were a
caste society, in which the people making up one income group remained static
over time.
Of course that's not the case. The composition of the rich and poor in this
country is in constant flux, as the income distribution changes dramatically over
relatively short periods. Few are "stuck" in poverty, or have a "lock" on wealth.
Obama would discover this if only he'd put down his class-warfare manuals and
look closely at the IRS' own data.
Take those megarich he vilifies — the top hundredth of a percent. According to a
recent Treasury study, three-fourths of them in 1996 fell out of the group by
2005.
Meanwhile, more than half of those in the bottom income group in 1996 moved
to a higher income group by 2005, with more than 5% leapfrogging to the richest
quintile.
(It's no fluke: The same high degree of income mobility is seen in prior
comparable periods, as well.)
Some poor moved up through personal effort, while many rode an expanding
economy. Real median incomes of all taxpayers rose 24%, but the poor registered
the biggest gains of all.
President Kennedy understood that a growing economy is like a rising tide that
"lifts all boats." Obama, on the other hand, thinks some are lifted and others
lowered, as if the economy were a system of locks operated by a cabal of evil
capitalists.
He also fails to understand how taxes change behavior. He thinks raising taxes on
the most productive members of society won't "curb incentives to work or
invest." Even TV news anchor Charlie Gibson knows better.
During a primary debate, the ABC host took Obama to task for proposing a
doubling in the capital gains tax. History shows, he pointed out, that raising the
cap gains rate actually ends up costing the government revenues.
Obama just didn't get it. "Well, Charlie," he argued, "what I've said is that I would
look at raising the capital gains tax for purposes of fairness."
Forget growth and revenues. Let's just punish those "greedy" investors. It's the
same Marxist reasoning behind his plan to repeal the Bush tax cuts: The rich must
be made to pay their "fair" share, Obama asserts.
Never mind that the top 1% of taxpayers already pay 38% of the total tax burden,
according to recent IRS data, while the bottom 50% bear just 3% of the load.
Obama's economic plan also calls for mandating a "living wage." He plans to
saddle retailers with a $10 minimum wage indexed to inflation, along with a
mandate to provide seven days of paid sick leave to workers.
Obama assumes business owners will just eat the added costs.
But restaurants, the nation's second-largest private-sector employer, already
operate on razor-thin profit margins. Faced with such mandatory paid benefits,
they'll have no choice but to cut staff.
In fact, the last major minimum-wage increase cost the restaurant industry more
than 146,000 jobs, the National Restaurant Association says, while restaurant
owners put off plans to hire an additional 106,000 employees.
So Obama would get his wage-and-benefits mandate, but lose jobs in an industry
that employs the very minorities Obama claims he's trying to help.
"If restaurateurs had their way, every lawmaker would run a small business before
starting to legislate," the industry opined in a recent press release.
Lawmakers aren't the only ones. Leftist presidential candidates also could benefit
from such a mandate.
Young Obama's Red Mentor
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Tuesday, August 05, 2008 4:20 PM PT
Election '08: The mainstream media have finally gotten around to revealing
Barack Obama's early mentor. But they've downplayed the mystery man's
communist background.

IBD Series: The Audacity Of Socialism

As noted in the July 29 curtain-raiser to this series, the seeds of Obama's far-left
ideology were planted in his formative years as a teenager growing up in Hawaii
— and they were far more radical than any biography or media profile has
portrayed.
A careful reading of Obama's first memoir, "Dreams From My Father," reveals that
his childhood mentor up to the age of 18 — a man he refers to only as "Frank" —
was none other than the late communist Frank Marshall Davis, who fled Chicago
after the FBI and Congress opened investigations into his "subversive," "un-
American activities."
In a belated story on the relationship, the Associated Press describes Davis as
"left-leaning."
In fact, Davis was a member of the Moscow-controlled Communist Party USA,
according to the 1953 report of the Commission on Subversive Activities of the
Territory of Hawaii, which labeled him "a bitter opponent of capitalism." The
report was introduced as evidence in the U.S. Senate Internal Security
Subcommittee hearings probing the "Scope of Soviet Activity in the United
States."
"Davis scholars dismiss the idea that he was anti-American," the AP reports. But
one of them, ex-University of Hawaii professor Kathryn Takara, acknowledges in a
Ph.D. paper on Davis (not quoted by AP) that he'd been fingered as "a
Communist."
Davis wrote militant poems as a black writer in Chicago, including one in which
he hails the Soviet revolution: "Smash on, victory-eating Red Army." He also
attacked traditional Christianity, titling one inflammatory screed, "Christ is a Dixie
N*****."
As Obama was preparing to head off to college, he sat at Davis' feet in his Waikiki
bungalow for bitter nightly bull sessions. Davis plied his impressionable guest
with liberal shots of whiskey and advice, including: Never trust the white
establishment.
"They'll train you so good," he said, "you'll start believing what they tell you
about equal opportunity and the American way and all that sh**."
In the eyes of white America, Davis warned Obama: "You may be a well-trained,
well-paid n*****, but you're a n***** just the same." He also nurtured anti-white
hatred in his young mulatto subject, telling him, "Black people have a reason to
hate."
AP conveniently glossed over these quotes.
How much influence did Comrade Davis have on Obama? The Democrat White
House hopeful refuses to talk about the relationship now. In the book, he only
shares that he was "intrigued by old Frank, with his books and whiskey breath
and the hint of hard-earned knowledge."
However, Obama followed in Davis' footsteps after college, working as a
"community organizer" for the same socialist network in Chicago. He even
considered a career in journalism like Davis.
Obama attended socialist conferences, and took a shine to other black Marxist
revolutionists. Not long after Davis died in 1987, Obama came under the spell of
another black nationalist-socialist, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who, like Davis, wore
a dashiki and became a father figure.
If the relationship with Davis was as blasé as the Associated Press makes it sound,
why is Obama mum about it? And why did he try to hide Davis' identity in his first
memoir, published in 1995?
"With the exception of my family and a handful of public figures," he wrote in the
preface, "the names of most characters have been changed for the sake of
privacy." But there was no need to protect Davis' privacy. He had long been dead.
More likely, the cryptic references to his communist mentor were — and still are
— designed to protect Obama's background from the scrutiny it deserves.
Obama Finds An ACORN
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Wednesday, August 06, 2008 4:20 PM
PT
Election '08: The man who includes being a community organizer on his short
resume has a long association with a far-left group that would organize our
communities into socialist gulags.

IBD Series: The Audacity Of Socialism

In 1995, Illinois Gov. Jim Edgar balked at implementing the federal motor voter
law out of concern that letting people register via postcard and blocking the state
from pruning voter rolls might invite vote fraud.
A young lawyer, a community organizer himself, sued on behalf of the
Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (Acorn) and won. The
young lawyer was Barack Obama. Acorn later invited Obama to train its staff.
When Obama served on the board of the Woods Fund for Chicago with Weather
Underground terrorist William Ayers, the Woods Fund frequently gave Acorn
grants to fund its agenda and voter registration activities.
Acorn has been in the lead in opposing voter ID laws and other efforts to ensure
ballot integrity. Acorn has been implicated in voter fraud and bogus registration
schemes in Ohio and at least 13 other states. Acorn staffers will presumably be
out registering voters again this year.
Obama also opposes voter ID laws. He believes they disenfranchise voters. Last
year, Obama put a hold on the nomination of Hans von Spakovsky for a seat on
the Federal Election Commission. It seems von Spakovsky, as an official in the
Justice Department, had supported a Georgia photo ID law. Acorn espouses the
leftist view that voter ID laws are racist.
In addition to subverting American democracy to promote a leftist agenda,
Acorn's radical agenda amounts to "undisguised authoritarian socialism." wrote
Sol Stern in the 2003 City Journal article, "Acorn's Nutty Regime for Cities."
Acorn opposed welfare reform and opposes securing American borders to stem
the flow of illegal immigrants. Acorn was heavily involved a few years back in
opposing Rudy Giuliani's efforts to privatize failing New York schools.
Acorn also has been in the lead supporting the "living wage" and opposing
efforts by big-box retailers such as Wal-Mart to bring the bounty and benefits of
free-market capitalism to inner cities.
Wal-Mart has faced resistance to its plans to expand into urban centers — most
notably Chicago and Los Angeles — where unions and liberal orthodoxy remain
strong. Opponents there charge that such big-box stores exploit workers, depress
wages and drive out community businesses.
Acorn, Obama's former client, supported a big-box living-wage ordinance vetoed
by Chicago's Mayor Richard Daley to require stores of at least 90,000 square feet
operated by firms with $1 billion or more in annual sales nationwide to pay
workers a minimum of $10 an hour plus $3 in benefits.
Critics such as Acorn, who complain that Wal-Mart employees live paycheck to
paycheck, forget that many of Wal-Mart's customers also live paycheck to
paycheck and seek quality merchandise at decent prices, which is why 100 million
people shop there every week.
How can they oppose "low" wages for Wal-Mart employees while in effect
supporting higher prices for Wal-Mart customers? They can because they believe
the socialist orthodoxy that capitalism is bad, government is good and that the
solution to poverty is to make everyone equally poor.
Wal-Mart gives people what they want at a price they can afford. It believes a fair
wage is one agreed upon between employee and employer. It is the poster child
for roll-up-your-sleeves capitalism. It is efficient, innovative, successful and
nonunion — everything government is not — and is opposed for all these
reasons.
Advocates of the so-called living wage see their efforts as putting money directly
into workers' pockets. But it merely transfers money from one person's pocket to
another person's pocket. This is classic socialist income redistribution — not
economic justice, but economic extortion.
In the real world, companies that pay workers more than the value of the goods
and services they produce go out of business. Workers should be paid what their
labor is worth, not what their lifestyle requires.
On his Web site, Obama embraces Acorn's socialist goal, pledging to "raise the
minimum wage and index it to inflation to make sure that full-time workers can
earn a living wage that allows them to raise their families and pay for basic needs
such as food, transportation and housing."
That money would come from taxpayers and business owners or, as Marx would
say, from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.
Reparations By Another Name
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Friday, August 08, 2008 4:30 PM PT
Election '08: Barack Obama says Washington shouldn't just offer apologies for
slavery, but also "deeds." Don't worry, he says, he's not talking about direct
reparations. Relieved? Don't be.

IBD Series: The Audacity Of Socialism

'I consistently believe that when it comes to . . . reparations," Obama recently told
a gathering of minority journalists, "the most important thing for the U.S.
government to do is not just offer words, but offer deeds."
A few days later, he clarified his remarks, saying he's not calling for direct cash
payments to descendents of slaves, but rather indirect aid in the form of
government programs that will "close the gap" between what he sees as white
America and black America.
He says government should offer "universal" programs — such as universal
health care, universal mortgage credits, college tuition, job training and even
universal 401(k)s — that "disproportionately affect people of color."
In other words, reparations by another name.
Obama knows that if he pushes too hard on reparations, he might scare off white
voters. So he couches race-specific welfare as "universal" social programs that
appeal to broad-based political coalitions — "even if they disproportionately help
minorities," he confides in his book, "Audacity of Hope."
Obama has a name for his scheme: "universal strategies."
"An emphasis on universal, as opposed to race-specific, programs isn't just good
policy," he wrote. "It's also good politics."
Maybe so. But not all his plans for reparations are roundabout. His book and Web
site outline a separate plan calling for essentially a government bailout of the
inner cities. Among other things, he proposes:
• Doling out faith-based grants "targeting ex-offenders."
 • Subsidizing supermarket chains that relocate to the inner city to deliver
"fresh produce" to blacks, helping wean them off unhealthy fast food.
• Imposing "goals and timetables for minority hiring" on large corporations
whose work forces are deemed too white.
• Continuing to fund the Community Development Block Grant program,
Head Start and HUD public housing subsidies.
• Funding Small Business Administration loans for minority businesses who
train ex-felons, including gangbangers, for the "green jobs" of the future,
such as installing extra insulation in homes.
• Doubling the funding for federal after-school programs such as midnight
basketball.
• Subsidizing job training, day care, transportation for inner-city poor, as
well as doubling the funding of the federal Jobs Access and Reverse
Commute program.
• Expanding the eligibility of the earned income tax credit to include more
poor, and indexing it to inflation.
• Adopting entire inner-city neighborhoods as wards of the federal
government.
• Spending billions on new inner-city employment programs, including
prison-to-work programs.
This is just a down payment on the "economic justice" Obama has promised the
NAACP — financed by "tax laws that restore some balance to the distribution of
the nation's wealth," he says in his book.
And the indirect aid he's proposing now could quickly turn into cash transfers
once Obama is safely ensconced in the White House.
Claiming "blacks were forced into ghettos," Obama is certainly sympathetic to the
idea of reparations. His church has actively petitioned for them for decades. And
he's strongly suggested there's a legal case to be made for them.
"So many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today
can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that
suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow," he said. "We still
haven't fixed them."
He assumes the economic gap is a legacy of discrimination and largely unrelated
to personal responsibility. He also makes it seem things haven't gotten better for
blacks.
In this, Obama is intellectually dishonest. In his book, he cites statistics showing a
70% rise over the past two decades in the number of "Latino families considered
middle class," but never cites one stat showing the even more impressive gains of
the black middle class. He complains about low black wages, but never mentions
the quantum leap in black home-ownership rates.
Why? Such stats would undermine his case for roundabout reparations. Even if it
were true, he says, "better isn't good enough."
"The problems of inner-city poverty arise from our failure to face up to an often
tragic past," Obama said.
Now it's payback time.
Obama's Little Red Schoolhouse
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Monday, August 11, 2008 4:20 PM PT
Schools: While Obama's children enjoy the best education money can buy, he
wants to deny inner-city children the education change we can believe in —
school choice. He prefers cradle-to-diploma collectivist education.

IBD Series: The Audacity Of Socialism

When Barack Obama collected the endorsement of the American Federation of

Teachers, he told the teachers that support for alternatives to the education
monopoly amounted to "tired rhetoric about vouchers and school choice."
He recently told an interviewer that he opposes school choice because "although
it might benefit some kids at the top, what you're going to do is leave a lot of
kids at the bottom."
Not being left behind are Obama's daughters, who attend the private University
of Chicago Laboratory Schools. There, tuition ranges from $15,528 for
kindergarten to $20,445 for high school. When asked about it during last year's
YouTube debate, Sen. Obama responded that it was "the best option" for his
children. They had a choice Obama would deny others.
Obama has been completely silent about the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship
Program.
The D.C. School Choice Act of 2003 established the federally funded voucher
program that provides vouchers of up to $7,500 for students in kindergarten
through 12th grade. It lets students attend one of 60 participating nonpublic
schools.
But it was funded only through the 2008-09 school year. Democrats such as D.C.'s
delegate to Congress, Eleanor Holmes Norton, want to kill the successful
program, which shows that money is not the root of a good education.
Norton and Obama seem oblivious to the fact that District school spending is at
$13,400 per student — third-highest in the nation. Yet in 2007, D.C. public
schools ranked last in math scores and second-to-last in reading scores for all
urban public school systems in the U.S., according to the National Assessment of
Educational Progress.
Norton is leading the charge to block a mere $18 million in funding for the 2009-
10 school year. This demonstration program serves some 1,900 students. A recent
Education Department report found that nearly 90% of Opportunity scholarship
students had higher reading scores than peers who didn't receive a scholarship.
Not surprisingly, there are five applicants for every opening.
April Cole-Walton's daughter attends St. Peter's Interparish School thanks to an
Opportunity Scholarship. "If I could talk to Sen. Obama," she says, "I would say,
'Give me a choice and give my daughter a chance.' "
Fat chance. Obama instead offers support for things like universal preschool,
based on the idea that the earlier the government gets its hands on our children,
the better off they will be. The nanny state will spend more money and pay for
more teachers.
Obama also wants to create something called the American Opportunity Tax
Credit to provide a "free" college education by ensuring that the first $4,000 of
college tuition is covered for students from lower-income families. Each student
will be required to put in 100 hours of "voluntary" national service a year to get
the money.
Obama's buddy, former Weatherman terrorist William Ayers, has plans for the
same captive student audiences Obama wants to keep captive. Now a tenured
Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois, Chicago, Ayers
works to educate teachers in socialist revolutionary ideology, urging that it be
passed on to impressionable students.
One of Ayers' descriptions for a course called "Improving Learning Environments"
says a prospective K-12 teacher needs to "be aware of the social and moral
universe we inhabit and . . . be a teacher capable of hope and struggle, outrage
and action, teaching for social justice and liberation."
For his course "Urban Education," Ayers writes: "In a truly just society, there would
be a greater sharing of the burden, a fairer distribution of material and human
resources."
All of this sounds like Obama's plans for "economic justice" and redistribution of
the nation's wealth.
Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley has employed Ayers as a teacher trainer for the
city's public schools. On his Web site, Obama describes Ayers as a "tenured
professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a 'respected advisor to
Mayor Daley on school reform.' "
And a future secretary of education, perhaps?
Obama's Radical Roots And Rules
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Thursday, August 14, 2008 4:20 PM PT
Election '08: Most Americans revile socialism, yet Barack Obama's poll numbers
remain competitive. One explanation: He's a longtime disciple of a man whose
mission was to teach radicals to disguise their ideology.

IBD Series: The Audacity Of Socialism

The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee's choice of the word "change"

as his campaign's central slogan is not the product of focus-group studies, or the
brainstorming sessions of his political consultants.
One of Obama's main inspirations was a man dedicated to revolutionary change
that he was convinced "must be preceded by a passive, affirmative,
nonchallenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people. They
must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system
that they are willing to let go of the past and change the future."

Saul Alinsky, circa 1946: Like Obama, he wanted "change."

Sen. Obama was trained by Chicago's Industrial Areas Foundation, founded in
1940 by the radical organizer Saul Alinsky. In the 1980s, Obama spent years as
director of the Developing Communities Project, which operated using Alinsky's
strategies, and was involved with two other Alinsky-oriented entities, Acorn and
Project Vote.
On the Obama campaign Web site can be found a photo of him teaching in a
University of Chicago classroom with "Power Analysis" and "Relationships Built on
Self Interest" written on the blackboard — key terms utilized in the Alinsky
method.
The far-left Alinsky had no time for liberalism or liberals, declaring that "a liberal
is (someone) who puts his foot down firmly on thin air." He wanted nothing less
than transformational radicalism. "America was begun by its radicals," he wrote.
"America was built by its radicals. The hope and future of America lies with its
radicals." And so, "This is the job for today's radical — to fan the embers of
hopelessness into a flame to fight. To say, '. . . let us change it together!' "
Alinsky students ranged "from militant Indians to Chicanos to Puerto Ricans to
blacks from all parts of the black power spectrum, from Panthers to radical
philosophers, from a variety of campus activists, S.D.S. and others, to a priest who
was joining a revolutionary party in South America."
Capitalism always was considered the enemy. "America's corporations are a
spiritual slum," he wrote, "and their arrogance is the major threat to our future as
a free society." Is it surprising that an Alinsky disciple such as Obama can promise
so blithely to increase taxes on CEOs?
Obama calls his years as an Alinskyesque community organizer in Chicago "the
best education I ever had, and where I learned the true meaning of my Christian
faith." But as radicalism expert Richard Lawrence Poe has noted, "Camouflage is
key to Alinsky-style organizing. In organizing coalitions of black churches in
Chicago, Obama caught flak for not attending church himself. He became an
instant churchgoer."
Indeed, Alinsky believed in sacrificing ethics and morals for the great cause.
"Ethical standards must be elastic to stretch with the times," Alinsky wrote in his
last book, "Rules for Radicals," adding that "all values are relative in a world of
political relativity."
Published a year before Alinsky's death in 1972, "Rules for Radicals" includes a
dedication in which he gives "an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very
first radical . . . who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively
that he at least won his own kingdom — Lucifer."
Alinsky's writings even explain what often seems like Obama's oversized ego. In
New Hampshire in January, for example, the senator told an audience that "a
beam of light will come down upon you, you will experience an epiphany . . . and
you will suddenly realize that you must go to the polls and vote for Obama."
It was a bizarre spectacle, but consider that Alinsky believed that "anyone who is
working against the haves is always facing odds, and in many cases heavy odds. If
he or she does not have that complete self-confidence (or call it ego) that he can
win, then the battle is lost before it is even begun."
According to Alinsky, "Ego must be so all-pervading that the personality of the
organizer is contagious, that it converts the people from despair to defiance,
creating a mass ego."
Alinsky also readily admitted that he didn't trust the people themselves. "It is the
schizophrenia of a free society that we outwardly espouse faith in the people but
inwardly have strong doubts whether the people can be trusted," he wrote.
"Seeking some meaning in life," the middle class, according to Alinsky, "turn to an
extreme chauvinism and become defenders of the 'American' faith."
This is evocative of Obama's remark during the primaries that small-town
Americans are "bitter" and "cling to guns or religion."
Obama is also following Alinsky's instructions to the hard left for attaining power
in America. In the last chapter of "Rules for Radicals," titled "The Way Ahead," is
found this declaration: "Activists and radicals, on and off our college campuses —
people who are committed to change — must make a complete turnabout."
Alinsky noted that "our rebels have contemptuously rejected the values and way
of life of the middle class. They have stigmatized it as materialistic, decadent,
bourgeois, degenerate, imperialistic, war-mongering, brutalized and corrupt."
According to Alinsky, "They are right," but he cautioned his comrades that "the
power and the people are in the big middle-class majority." Therefore, an
effective radical activist "discards the rhetoric that always says 'pig' " in reference
to police officers, plus other forms of disguise, "to radicalize parts of the middle
class."
Obama's rhetorical window-dressing is easily recognizable as Alinskyesque
camouflage. New annual spending of more than $340 billion, as estimated by the
National Taxpayers Union, is merely a wish to "recast" the safety net woven by
FDR and LBJ, as Obama describes it in his writings. The free market is disparaged
as a "winner-take-all" economy. Big tax increases masquerade as "restoring
fairness to the economy."
Barack Obama's "Change We Can Believe In" is simply socialism — imposed by
stratagem because Americans have never believed in Marxist economics. Saul
Alinsky understood this, and his ghost is alive and well — and threatening to
haunt the White House.
Like Father, Like Son
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Monday, August 18, 2008 4:20 PM PT
Election '08: Barack Obama's economic blueprint sounds like one his communist
father tried to foist on Kenya 40 years ago, with massive taxes and succor
shrouded as "investments."

IBD Series: The Audacity Of Socialism

As a Nairobi bureaucrat, Barack Hussein Obama Sr. advised the pro-Western

Kenyan government there to "redistribute" income through higher taxes. He also
demonized corporations and called for massive government "investment" in
social programs.

Barack Obama Sr., who died in 1982 at age 46 in a Kenya car crash.
Writing in a 1965 scholarly paper, Obama's late father slammed the
administration of then-President Jomo Kenyatta for moving the Third World
country away from socialism toward capitalism. He chafed at the idea of relying
on private investors — who earn "dividends" on their venture capital — to
develop the country's fledgling economy.
"What is more important is to find means by which we can redistribute our
economic gains to the benefit of all," said the senior Obama, a Harvard-educated
economist. "This is the government's obligation." The "means" he had in mind
were confiscatory taxes on a scale that redefines the term "progressive taxation."
"Theoretically," he wrote, "there is nothing that can stop the government from
taxing 100% of income so long as the people get benefits from the government
commensurate with their income which is taxed."
Therefore, he added, "I do not see why the government cannot tax those who
have more and syphon some of these revenues into savings which can be utilized
in investment for future development."
As Obama's father saw it, taxes couldn't be high enough, so long as the collective
benefited. "Certainly there is no limit to taxation if the benefits derived from
public services by society measure up to the cost in taxation which they have to
pay," he said. "It is a fallacy to say that there is this limit, and it is a fallacy to rely
mainly on individual free enterprise to get the savings."
His son is also pushing massive taxes and "investments" in social programs — at
the expense of free enterprise. Sen. Obama wants to raise the top marginal
income-tax rate to at least 39%, while increasing Social Security taxes on those
with higher incomes by completely removing the payroll cap. That means many
entrepreneurs would be paying 12.4% (6.2% on employer and 6.2% on employee)
on Social Security payroll taxes alone, plus the 2.9% on Medicare taxes, for a total
federal tax rate of 54%.
In addition, Obama wants to jack up the capital-gains tax rate and reinstate the
death tax.
Echoing his father, he argues that the government should impose "tax laws that
restore some balance to the distribution of the nation's wealth."
And likewise, he asserts that the nation's wealth ought to be rechanneled by
government into "investments" in the economy and welfare programs that create
"a new American social compact."
"We can only compete if our government makes the investments that give us a
fighting chance" in the global economy, the Democrat presidential hopeful said
in his 2006 book, "The Audacity of Hope." "And if we know that our families have
some net beneath which they cannot fall."
"Training must be expanded," his father proposed as one of his government
"investments." Likewise, Sen. Obama wants to "invest" billions more in federal
jobs retraining.
His father's critique of Kenya's economic policy was published in the East Africa
Journal under the title "Problems Facing Our Socialism." One discovers — after
reading just a few pages into his eight-page tract, where he waxes quixotic about
"communal ownership of major means of production" — that he wasn't criticizing
the government for being too socialistic, but not socialistic enough.
Obama Sr. described his own economic plan, his counterproposal, as it were, as
"scientific socialism — inter alia — communism." Yes, Obama's father was a
communist who wanted to put socialist theory into action — by "force."
He trusted the collective over the individual, a theme he successfully instilled in
his son, also Harvard-educated, with whom he visited once for a full month in
Hawaii, even speaking to his prep school class. He kept up correspondence with
his son through his college years.
(Media accounts portray Obama's father as being completely out of his life after
leaving his mother and him at age 2. But Obama's first book, "Dreams From My
Father," reveals that he remained an influential force in his life. Obama's first
autobiography was devoted to "my father.")
Listen to what "the Old Man," as Obama and his siblings called him, wrote in
proposing government-run farms: "If left to the individual, consolidation will take
a long time to come. We have to look at priorities in terms of what is good for
society, and on this basis we may find it necessary to force people to do things
they would not do otherwise."
He explained that "the government should restrict the size of farms that can be
owned by one individual throughout the country."
More evil than individuals, Obama's father believed, are heads of corporations.
More evil still are the bankers and investors, who conspire to control the world
through their evil capitalist system.
"One who has read Marx cannot fail to see that corporations are not only what
Marx referred to as the advanced stage of capitalism," he wrote. "But Marx even
called it finance capitalism by which a few would control the finances of so many,
and through this, have not only economic power but political power as well."
It's clear from Sen. Obama's own writings and speeches that he too is no fan of
business or our system of "chaotic and unforgiving capitalism," as he wrote in
"Audacity." He's fond of bashing Wall Street "greed" and the post-Reagan rise of
individual investing over government investing. He wants to roll back the
"Ownership Society." He resents the profit motive and individuals "on the make."
"Rather than vilify the rich," he laments, "we hold them up as role models, and
our mythology is steeped in stories of men on the make."
This is no small point. The man who wants to be the nation's CEO actually
believes we're living in a feudal society where the rich plunder the poor. And he
thinks they should not only be vilified but punished.
"The problems of poverty and racism, the uninsured and the unemployed are
rooted in the desire among those at the top of the social ladder to maintain their
wealth and status whatever the cost," he wrote. "Solving these problems will
require changes in government policy."
That is, massive taxation, among other things (or "inter alia," as his "brilliant"
father would say).
Obama wrote in "Dreams From My Father" that he was trying to impress his
father by taking a low-paying job organizing and agitating in the Chicago ghetto
right out of college. "I did feel that there was something to prove to my father,"
he said.
Yet, suspiciously, he does not once mention his father's communist leanings in an
entire book dedicated to his memory. No doubt he wanted to keep that hidden.
All he tells readers is that his father was pushed out of the Kenyatta
administration. He does not explain why.
"Word got back to Kenyatta that the Old Man was a troublemaker and he was
called in to see the president," Obama wrote, quoting his half-sister, "because he
could not keep his mouth shut." About what, we aren't told.
However, Obama writes sympathetically of a comrade of his father, Oginga
Odinga, who stepped down as vice president and tried to start his own party. He
too was angry that President Kenyatta was letting private investors buy up
businesses and land "that should be redistributed to the people," Obama said.
By 1967, two years after Obama Sr. penned his paper, Odinga had been placed
under house arrest for holding a rally that turned into a riot.
Like Obama's father, Odinga was a member of the Luo tribe of Kenya. His son,
Raila Odinga, ran for president in 2006. That year, Obama traveled to Kenya and
appeared with Odinga at rallies where he criticized the pro-U.S. government
Odinga wanted to oust.
When he lost the election the next year, despite Obama's tacit endorsement,
angry Odinga supporters crying fraud sparked riots that resulted in some 1,500
deaths. Amid his ancestral country's civil unrest, Obama took time out from the
campaign trail to phone Odinga to voice his support.
After weeks of violence, Odinga was granted a power-sharing deal. He's now
acting prime minister.
He's also a something of a communist like his father. An East German-trained
engineer, he named his oldest son after Fidel Castro. Paralleling him, Sen. Obama
wants to open dialogue with Cuba and once proposed lifting the trade embargo.
The two sons have much in common. However, the son who would lead the U.S.
learned from his father's mistakes and keeps his "mouth shut." Obama learned
that revealing his real beliefs can jeopardize his quest for the power needed to
put his "redistribution" plans into action.
Finding Friends On Far, Far Left
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Wednesday, August 20, 2008 4:20 PM
PT
Election '08: The saying that a man is known by the company he keeps is true of
political relationships. In Barack Obama's case, some of the groups that support
him are an indictment of his political orientation.

IBD Series: The Audacity Of Socialism

Among Obama's biggest admirers, for example, is one Pepe Lozano. Unknown at
the national level, Lozano is more of a small-time agitator, just as Obama was in
his community organizing days in Chicago. Maybe that explains part of the
attraction.
But it's more likely that Lozano, a leader in the Chicago Young Communist
League and an editorial board member of the People's Weekly World, newspaper
of the Communist Party USA, finds that Obama is the communist party's best
hope because of the junior senator's far-left positions.
"This is a history-making process," Lozano told a Chicago gathering of about 250
in June, "and we will be missing it if we don't do all we can to elect Barack Obama
president."
The next month, the People's Weekly World editorialized in favor of Obama,
calling his a "transformative candidacy that would advance progressive politics
for the long term."
The communist support is nothing new, however. Joel Wendland, managing
editor of Political Affairs: Marxist Thought Online, another CPUSA magazine,
suggested in February that Obama could be "the people's president."
Also in February, Political Affairs editor Terri Albano talked about how the "kind
of upsurge" surrounding Obama "comes around just once in a lifetime. I hope for
all progressives — each of us — (to) get involved. Don't stand on the sidelines. Be
active. Don't let history pass you by."
While communists are endorsing Obama, the Communist Party USA isn't. But
that's not because it doesn't like Obama. The CPUSA simply does not endorse
candidates. Yet it issued what could be called a non-endorsement endorsement
of Obama in March, saying "his campaign has the clearest message of unity and
progressive change."
"This election can begin to turn the tide: It can help bring universal health care,
save the environment and start the restoration of our democratic rights," the
group said. "This election can strengthen democracy for all."
If Obama is smarting because he didn't get an official Communist Party USA
endorsement, maybe he will be mollified by the approval of an old communist to
the south. Fidel Castro in the spring wrote in the state newspaper Granma that
Obama is "the most progressive candidate for the U.S. presidency."
That's an endorsement that anyone who doesn't have a socialist agenda should
be ashamed of, especially given Castro's murder and intimidation of his foes and
his repeated, egregious human rights violations of average Cuban citizens.
But from what we can tell, Obama has not rejected Castro's support. What we can
tell, though, is that when Obama says he stands for change, he could be talking
about erasing facts that he considers to be politically damaging.
Last month he scrubbed clean from his Web site evidence that he opposed the
successful Iraq surge, and last winter he deleted the endorsement of the
extremist Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who had become a political liability.
But despite his campaign's penchant for cyberhygiene, the community blog on
his own Web site still has an entry that's rather incriminating: "This group is for
self-proclaimed Marxists/Communists/Socialists for the election of Barack Obama
to the presidency. . . . We support Barack Obama because he knows what is best
for the people!" The fact that it can still be found on Obama's official site would
indicate that the campaign has no problem with it — and that it might even
appreciate the endorsement.
The current campaign is not Obama's first association with groups that promote
socialism or its more stringent ideological cousin, communism.
In 1995, he sought the endorsement of the New Party for his 1996 state Senate
candidacy. The party — a collection of anti-capitalist ex-communists and
socialists that disbanded in 1998 after six years of trying to push the Democratic
Party even further left — gladly gave Obama its support.
Obama also was endorsed in that election by the Democratic Socialists of
America, the largest socialist group in the U.S. While the name might sound
benign, the DSA has a poisonous agenda. Its goal is to establish "an openly
socialist presence in American communities and politics" and is committed to
"restructuring society."
Members "are socialists because we reject an international economic order
sustained by private profit, alienated labor, race and gender discrimination,
environmental destruction, and brutality and violence in defense of the status
quo."
Just as it should be no surprise that a Che Guevara poster was found hanging in
an Obama campaign office, it would not be a shock to see an Obama poster on a
wall in the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism's
headquarters.
Mark Solomon, the group's national co-chair, wrote in a virtual endorsement in
February that Obama "is an attractive, articulate and talented politician" whose
"campaign has sparked a powerful surge."
But that would be expected, since this group, which branched off from the
Communist Party USA in 1991, organized the October 2002 rally in which Obama
criticized the U.S. invasion of Iraq — while still serving as a state senator in Illinois.
The ties between Obama and the committees go back years.
Across the Atlantic, the Party of European Socialists also has given its blessing.
President Poul Nyrup Rasmussen says that "Obama is the choice for change and
renewal. He gives hope to millions of Americans and Europeans for a fairer world.
. . . Progressive Europeans are united in hope that Barack Obama will be the new
president following the U.S. elections."
Obama supporters might excuse the candidate's support from communists,
Marxists and socialists, saying he is the only alternative since these groups would
never support the Republican nominee. (Which is entirely correct and indicative
of the Democratic Party's continuing decline into the pit of democratic socialism.)
But the truth is, these groups usually reserve their endorsements and support for
fringe candidates, not someone from a major party. That's not the case this time
around. They seem to have their man.
Alice In Obamaland
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Thursday, August 21, 2008 4:20 PM PT
Election '08: One of the "lies" Barack Obama says are being told about him is
quite true. It involves a staunch admirer of the Soviet Union and its communist
society who helped launch Obama's political career.

IBD Series: The Audacity Of Socialism

Among the alleged lies mentioned in the Obama campaign's 40-page response
to author Jerome Corsi's book "Obama Nation" is the claim that when Obama ran
for state senator, "instead of stepping aside in deference to (state Sen. Alice)
Palmer, Obama decided to fight her for the nomination."
The Obama campaign quotes a state representative who said Palmer "pulled her
own plug."
But as ABC News senior correspondent Jake Tapper notes on his blog, it is
Obama who is the truth-challenged one. "This is not a lie, this is true," Tapper
says. "Palmer had decided to run for Congress, and Obama was tapped to run to
replace her. When Palmer lost in the (U.S. House) primary, she wanted to stay as a
state senator. Obama said no. He had every right to do so, but he decided to
fight her for the nomination instead of stepping aside in deference to her."
According to the Chicago Tribune, Obama operatives flooded into the Chicago
Board of Election Commissioners on Jan. 2, 1996, to begin the tedious process of
challenging hundreds of signatures on the nominating petitions of Palmer and
three other lesser-known contenders for her Illinois state Senate seat. They kept
challenging petitions until every one of Obama's Democratic primary rivals was
forced off the ballot.
As the Tribune noted, "The man now running for president on a message of
giving a voice to the voiceless first entered public office not by leveling the
playing field, but by clearing it."
In 1995, Palmer introduced her chosen successor, Barack Obama, to a few of the
district's influential liberals at the home of two well-known figures on the local
left: William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, former members of the terrorist
Weather Underground.
"I remember being one of a small group of people who came to Bill Ayers' house
to learn that Alice Palmer was stepping down from the Senate and running for
Congress," says Quentin Young, a prominent Chicago physician and advocate for
single-payer health care. "(Palmer) identified (Obama) as her successor."
It was in 1995 that Palmer decided to pursue the opportunity of an open seat in
the U.S. House of Representatives after Mel Reynolds of Illinois' 2nd District
resigned due to allegations of sex with an underage campaign volunteer.
But Palmer hit a speed bump in November of that year when Jesse Jackson Jr.
defeated her in a special election for Reynolds' empty seat.
Palmer then refiled to keep her state Senate seat and asked Obama to withdraw.
Obama refused.
"I liked Alice Palmer a lot," Obama would say later. "I thought she was a good
public servant. It (the process by which Obama got Palmer off the ballot) was very
awkward. That part of it I wish had played out entirely differently."
Who Alice Palmer is and what she believed is the real story here.
Ten years earlier she was an executive board member of the U.S. Peace Council,
which the FBI identified as a communist front group, an affiliate of the World
Peace Council, a Soviet front group.
Palmer participated in the World Peace Council's 1983 Prague Assembly, part of
the Soviet launch of the nuclear-freeze movement. The only thing it would have
frozen was the Soviet Union's military superiority.
In June 1986, while editor of the Black Press Review, she wrote an article for the
Communist Party USA's newspaper, the People's Daily World, now the People's
Weekly World. It detailed her experience attending the 27th Congress of the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union and how impressed she was by the Soviet
system.
Palmer gushed at the "Soviet plan to provide people with higher wages and
better education" and spoke of the efficiency of the Soviets' most recent five-year
plan, attributing its success to "central planning." She praised their
"comprehensive affirmative action program, which they have stuck to religiously
— if I can use the word — since 1917."
Palmer also marveled that all Russian citizens were guaranteed a job matching
their training and skills, free education, affordable housing and free medical care.
Because Soviet school curricula were established at the national level, she said,
"there is no second-class 'track' system in the minority-nationality schools as
there is in the inferior inner city schools in my hometown, Chicago, and elsewhere
in the United States."
Obama and Palmer both oppose school choice and vouchers and successful
programs like the D.C. Opportunity Scholarships. They prefer the central planning
of education as dictated by the teachers unions and the commissars at the
National Education Association.
When Obama won the Iowa caucuses, Frank Chapman, a member of the U.S.
Peace Council Executive Committee, wrote a letter to the People's Weekly World
celebrating the victory of Alice Palmer's former protégé.
"Obama's victory was more than a progressive move," Chapman wrote. "It was a
dialectical leap ushering in a new era of struggle. Marx once compared (the)
revolutionary new era of struggle with the work of the mole, who sometimes
burrows so far beneath the ground that he leaves no trace of his movement on
the surface."
Before old-style Chicago politics as practiced by an ambitious Obama doomed
their friendship, he thought Palmer was a good public servant, and Soviet admirer
Palmer thought he was a worthy heir. Why?
Michelle's Boot Camps For Radicals
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Thursday, September 04, 2008 4:20 PM
PT

Election '08: Democrats' reintroduction of militant Michelle Obama in Denver was

supposed to show her softer side. But it only highlighted a radical part of her resume:
Public Allies.

IBD Series: The Audacity Of Socialism

Barack Obama was a founding member of the board of Public Allies in 1992, resigning
before his wife became executive director of the Chicago chapter of Public Allies in
1993. Obama plans to use the nonprofit group, which he features on his campaign Web
site, as the model for a national service corps. He calls his Orwellian program, "Universal
Voluntary Public Service."

Big Brother had nothing on the Obamas. They plan to herd American youth into
government-funded reeducation camps where they'll be brainwashed into thinking
America is a racist, oppressive place in need of "social change."

The pitch Public Allies makes on its Web site doesn't seem all that radical. It promises to
place young adults (18-30) in paid one-year "community leadership" positions with
nonprofit or government agencies. They'll also be required to attend weekly training
workshops and three retreats.

In exchange, they'll get a monthly stipend of up to $1,800, plus paid health and child
care. They also get a post-service education award of $4,725 that can be used to pay off
past student loans or fund future education.

But its real mission is to radicalize American youth and use them to bring about "social
change" through threats, pressure, tension and confrontation — the tactics used by the
father of community organizing, Saul "The Red" Alinsky.

"Our alumni are more than twice as likely as 18-34 year olds to . . . engage in protest
activities," Public Allies boasts in a document found with its tax filings. It has already
deployed an army of 2,200 community organizers like Obama to agitate for "justice" and
"equality" in his hometown of Chicago and other U.S. cities, including Cincinnati, Los
Angeles, Milwaukee, New York, Phoenix, Pittsburgh and Washington. "I get to practice
being an activist," and get paid for it, gushed Cincinnati recruit Amy Vincent.
Public Allies promotes "diversity and inclusion," a program paper says. More than 70%
of its recruits are "people of color." When they're not protesting, they're staffing AIDS
clinics, handing out condoms, bailing criminals out of jail and helping illegal aliens and
the homeless obtain food stamps and other welfare.

Public Allies brags that more than 80% of graduates have continued working in nonprofit
or government jobs. It's training the "next generation of nonprofit leaders" — future
"social entrepreneurs."

The Obamas discourage work in the private sector. "Don't go into corporate America,"
Michelle has exhorted youth. "Work for the community. Be social workers." Shun the
"money culture," Barack added. "Individual salvation depends on collective salvation."

"If you commit to serving your community," he pledged in his Denver acceptance speech,
"we will make sure you can afford a college education." So, go through government to go
to college, and then go back into government.

Many of today's youth find the pitch attractive. "I may spend the rest of my life trying to
create social movement," said Brian Coovert of the Cincinnati chapter. "There is always
going to be work to do. Until we have a perfect country, I'll have a job."

Not all the recruits appreciate the PC indoctrination. "It was too touchy-feely," said Nelly
Nieblas, 29, of the 2005 Los Angeles class. "It's a lot of talk about race, a lot of talk about
sexism, a lot of talk about homophobia, talk about -isms and phobias."

One of those -isms is "heterosexism," which a Public Allies training seminar in Chicago
describes as a negative byproduct of "capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy and male-
dominated privilege."

The government now funds about half of Public Allies' expenses through Clinton's
AmeriCorps. Obama wants to fully fund it and expand it into a national program that
some see costing $500 billion. "We've got to have a civilian national security force that's
just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded" as the military, he said.

The gall of it: The Obamas want to create a boot camp for radicals who hate the military
— and stick American taxpayers with the bill.
Sojourning Socialists
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Tuesday, September 09, 2008 4:20 PM
PT

Election '08: Barack Obama has joined forces with a white socialist he calls a "good
friend" — the Rev. Jim Wallis, founder of "Sojourners." He too believes in "liberation
theology," sans the black nationalism. In fact, Wallis is the white version of Jeremiah
Wright, sans the black rage.

IBD Series: The Audacity Of Socialism

In addition to publishing "Sojourners" magazine, Wallis runs Call to Renewal — a

network of liberal churches and activist groups "committed to ending poverty and
racism."

Wright once joined Wallis at the U.S. Capitol in an anti-poverty "preach-in" sponsored
by Call to Renewal.

Jim Wallis is more eloquent than Obama's former mentor, Jeremiah Wright, but preaches
the same anti-American message.

Wallis and his Washington-based operation have essentially replaced Wright and his
militantly Afrocentric Chicago church, which Obama expediently dumped in the heat of
the primary race after videos surfaced of his fire-breathing preacher damning America.

The avuncular, noncombative Wallis offers Obama a voting bloc that Wright could never
help deliver: white Christian evangelicals, if in Birkenstocks.

At the Democratic National Convention in Denver, Obama tapped Wallis to oversee the
drafting of the faith-based plank of the party platform (which, by the way, champions
outreach programs for "ex-offenders").
"This is a very faith-friendly convention," Wallis said. "I think Democrats have really
gone through an important change." But their newfound faith is not one most mainline
Christians would even recognize, let alone embrace.

Like Wright and Obama, Wallis believes that biblical faith compels radical social action.
Their political ministry is called the "social gospel," but it's really just socialism dressed
up in a cheap tunic. They refuse to separate personal faith from political activism,
whether at home or abroad.

In the '80s, for example, Wallis and Wright rallied to the cause of the communist regime
in Nicaragua, and protested the U.S. arming of the Contra rebels. Wallis, in fact,
marshaled thousands of "Witnesses for Peace" and joined them in Nicaragua, making it
known they were willing to take a bullet to stop the anti-communist insurgency.

Wallis is more eloquent than Wright, but he preaches the same anti-American message.
According to discoverthenetworks.org, he once called the U.S. "the great power, the great
seducer, the great captor and destroyer of human life, the great master of humanity and
history in its totalitarian claims and designs."

Like Obama, Wallis got his start in Chicago, where he too was involved in community
organizing. He forged ties with black gang leaders, including at least one known cop-
killer.

While agitating in Chicago, Wallis published a newspaper called the "Post-American,"

which was printed by the same radicals who put out the Black Panther paper. Now in
D.C., he presides at funerals of gangbangers and runs a commune in the ghetto that
romanticizes blight and mocks efforts at urban renewal.

"I don't know which is the worst evil," he said in a 1994 interview with the Los Angeles
Times magazine, "the crackhouse or the gentrified house."

Wallis agrees with Obama that American racism and capitalism are to blame for inner-
city poverty, and echoes his oft-repeated call for "economic justice." They share a spread-
the-wealth vision, including subsidizing the working poor beyond expanded tax credits
and minimum-wage hikes.

"The Bible says prosperity has to be shared," Wallis said in a January 2000 interview
with IBD. "It's very simple."

"So far the rising tide is lifting all the yachts, but not the boats the poor inner-city kids are
in," he said, adding that the stock market has created a "casino economy."

Wallis likes to think of himself and his sojourners as "progressives." But "they're really
just socialists," said David Kelley, director of the Objectivist Center in New York.
Wallis may couch his Bolshevist views today. But in 1979, he was quoted in the journal
"Mission Tracks" saying he hoped that "more Christians will come to view the world
through Marxist eyes."

Obama is one who's seen the light. While delivering the keynote address for Wallis at his
Call to Renewal 2006 conference in Washington, he condemned the "idolatry of the free
market" and professed: "I believe in the power of the African-American religious
tradition to spur social change."

Wallis says Obama is the kind of leader he's been searching for, one who's "responsive to
social movements." "Barack Obama talks about 'being our brother's keeper' and how he
finds a faith that does justice to be compelling to him," he said in a recent interview.

But it's not just "movements" that Wallis has in mind. He recently wrote the foreword to
a leftist book titled, "The Revolution: A Field Manual for Changing Our World."

Wallis is also an anti-military pacifist who fasted for 47 days to protest last decade's
popular Gulf War.

Like his fellow traveler Obama, he believes 21st Century America is guilty of "structural
injustice and social oppression" aimed at blacks. His Sojourners magazine features
radical professor Cornel West as a contributing editor. West, a black Marxist, is working
as an adviser to Obama's campaign.

Wallis put another radical professor, James Cone, on his Sojourners editorial board. Cone
is Wright's mentor and the father of black liberation theology, a Marxist version of
Christianity that worships a white-hating black Jesus.

"Together," Cone said, "black religion and Marxist philosophy may show us a way to
build a completely new society."

Wallis, who once regularly attended black liberation churches in his hometown of
Detroit, has no problem with that. He says his mission is to "sojourn with others in
different faith and traditions" toward a common goal of "social justice."

Now he's hoping to sojourn his way into the White House with Obama, whose favorite
scripture happens to be a verse from Chronicles referencing sojourners: "For we are
strangers before thee, and sojourners, as were all our fathers." (He quotes from it in his
first memoir; in fact, it sits strangely alone on what should be his dedication page.)

Such foes of capitalism and apologists for communism belong in communes, not national
leadership. Better they sojourn their way completely out of American politics.
Community Organizer In Chief
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Tuesday, September 16, 2008 4:20 PM
PT

Election '08: Barack Obama claims he worked for a "small group of churches" as a
community organizer. In fact, he was hired by a radical Alinskyite group, and Saul
Alinsky's own son has outed him.

IBD Series: The Audacity Of Socialism

Buried last month in the Boston Globe's letters to the editor was a three-paragraph letter
congratulating Obama for putting on a great show at the Democratic National
Convention.

That open-stadium rally in Denver, with it's packed crowd and perfectly timed chanting
of key phrases, "had all the elements of the perfectly organized event, Saul Alinsky-
style," opined the letter-writer. The reference was to the hard-boiled Chicago socialist
and father of radical community organizing.

"Barack Obama's training in Chicago by the great community organizers is showing its
effectiveness," the author continued. "When executed meticulously and thoughtfully, it is
a powerful strategy for initiating change and making it really happen. Obama learned his
lesson well.

"I am proud to see that my father's model for organizing is being applied successfully
beyond local community organizing to affect the Democratic campaign in 2008," the
author said. "It is a fine tribute to Saul Alinsky as we approach his 100th birthday."

The person who signed the letter, Lee David Alinsky, a longtime public TV producer in
the Boston area, is indeed the son of the late radical. Alinsky no doubt felt compelled to
make the tribute on behalf of Obama because Obama refuses to even acknowledge his
Alinsky training in public.

He is quick to say that the community organizing he did in Chicago was "the best
education I ever had, better than anything I got at Harvard Law School." But he never
tells us who educated him, not even in the two memoirs he's written. He also fails to
disclose who hired him. Obama claimed in the recent national service forum at Columbia
University that he worked for "churches" while organizing on the South Side of Chicago.

Talk about putting lipstick on a pig. Obama in fact worked for a subsidiary of the radical
Gamaliel Foundation, a Chicago-based Alinsky group, and he was paid by the radical
Woods Fund, which supports Gamaliel. Gamaliel's Web site and history page make plain
that it evolved from the Alinsky school of organizing. Its training methods acknowledge
an "agitational" style of organizing.

Obama also fails to disclose that he himself became a trainer of community organizers for
the radical Gamaliel network. He also won't disclose that he contributed to a Chicago
forum called "After Alinsky," where he argued for a "systematic approach" to community
organizing and more "power" to bring about social change.

Serving on Gamaliel's board of directors is John McKnight, who wrote a letter of

recommendation for Obama to Harvard. McKnight is a noted "student of Alinsky" and
former ACLU director who now teaches at Northwestern University.

McKnight also sits on the board of the National People's Action, or NPA, a particularly
thuggish group of Alinskyite agitators who sing the following ditty when picketing the
homes of business and government leaders: "Who's on your hit list, NPA? Who's on your
hit list of today? Take no prisoner, take no names. Kick 'em in the ass when they play
their games."

Some community organizers are well-meaning and harmless. But not the ones Obama
threw in with. They intimidate and agitate for more government home loans, more
government job programs, a ban on police profiling, more benefits for illegal aliens, felon
voting rights, minimum wage hikes, "environmental justice" and so on.

What they do is not harmless. What they demand is not noble. But Obama wants to give
them more money and power, and organize them on a "large scale." He can run from his
radical organizing record, but he can't hide.
How Obama Applies Alinsky's Rules
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Monday, September 22, 2008 4:20 PM
PT

Election '08: Barack Obama's mocking of John McCain, while urging his followers to
"get in their face," are tactics right out of his radical hero Saul Alinsky's playbook:
ridicule and agitation.

IBD Series: The Audacity Of Socialism

At a recent Las Vegas rally, Obama poked fun at Sen. McCain for what he described as
bragging about "how as chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, he had oversight
of every part of the economy."

"Well, all I can say to Sen. McCain is, 'Nice job. Nice job,' " Obama said in a sarcastic
tone. "Where is he getting these lines? It's like a 'Saturday Night Live' routine."

Then he belittled the 72-year-old McCain for vowing to take on the old boys network. "In
the McCain campaign, that's called a staff meeting," he sneered.

The late Alinsky, a trench-warfare socialist who despised American capitalism, advised
community organizers like Obama to "laugh at the enemy" to provoke "irrational anger."

"Ridicule," he said, "is man's most potent weapon. It is almost impossible to

counterattack ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your
advantage."

At another rally in Nevada, Obama called on the crowd of about 1,500 to join him in
sharpening their elbows against McCain and his supporters. "I want you argue with them
and get in their face," he said, in a naked attempt to "fan hostilities" in the tightening race,
something Alinsky also advised from his bag of agitation tricks.

Obama doesn't look or talk like an angry radical. He speaks in measured tones and is
rarely seen out of business attire. That, too, is borrowed from Alinsky's playbook. "Don't
scare" the middle class, he guides urban revolutionaries in his 1970s manual, "Rules for
Radicals" (which he dedicated to mankind's "first radical, Lucifer").

Instead, look like them, talk like them, act like them.

And work for radical change from the inside — "like a spy behind enemy lines," as
Obama said in his first memoir. He wrote it before entering politics, while still working
with hard-left Alinsky groups and training street agitators known as "community
organizers."

As he wrote, he became a community organizer in 1983 because of "The need for change.
Change in the White House, where Reagan and his minions were carrying on their dirty
deeds."

That's when he set out to "organize black folks" for social revolution, first in Harlem,
then the South Side of Chicago. Now he wants to do it on a "large scale." Though most
average voters wouldn't know it, he's applying Alinsky's radical rules to achieve his goal.

Alinksy stressed that his rules be translated into real-life tactics responsive to the
situation at hand — which right now happens to be something he never could have
dreamed of: a disciple who would find himself in a viable battle for the most powerful
job in the world.

Obama has already translated several of Alinsky's rules into battle tactics, including:

• Rule: "Rub raw the resentments of the people; search out controversy and issues." In the
mortgage meltdown, for instance, Obama vows to prosecute "predatory lenders" for
"abusing" minority borrowers. He's also stoking class resentment by painting Wall Street
and other executives as villains.

• Rule: "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it." In an ad to woo Hispanic
voters, Obama demonized Rush Limbaugh by falsely claiming he made racist statements
against immigrants.

• Rule: "A mass impression can be lasting and intimidating." This explains why Obama
moved his acceptance speech to a football stadium and bussed in 85,000 supporters.
Alinsky's son was so impressed, he praised Obama for learning his father's "lesson well."

• Rule: "Multiple issues mean constant action and life" for the cause. This is why Obama
never harps on one issue, as Hillary did with health care. His platform is packed with
grievances from "economic justice" to "reproductive justice" to "environmental justice."

Obama is following almost to the letter the blueprint for socialist revolution drafted by
the father of community organizing.

While Alinsky may help him behind the scenes, however, he becomes a liability when
brought out of the shadows. Sarah Palin proved this in St. Paul when she ridiculed his
community organizing. Within hours, Obama surrogates whined about how just bringing
up the phrase was racist code for "black."

No, it's code for communist. And McCain should make that point instead of legitimizing
such radicalism, as he did recently when he said, "I respect community organizers; and
Sen. Obama's record there is outstanding" — which contradicted his running mate.
There's nothing to respect about such anti-American radicals, even if they have traded
their tie-dye for business ties.
Chicago Commune
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Tuesday, September 23, 2008 4:20 PM
PT

Election '08: Barack Obama summed up well the perversity of Democratic Party
thinking when he told Fox News' Bill O'Reilly that it is "neighborliness" for Washington
to hike taxes on those who are "sitting pretty."

IBD Series: The Audacity Of Socialism

His running mate, Joe Biden, followed up last week with the observation that it's
"patriotic" for the country's highest earners to pay more in taxes. Interesting that the party
that doesn't want to talk about patriotism is now using a form of the word to obscure its
devotion to socialist policies.

O'Reilly was right to point out to Obama that the senator is supporting a "socialist tenet"
with his "neighborly" comment earlier this month. But a reminder of the facts isn't likely
to change the Democratic candidate's inveterate stance. This is the man who told ABC's
Charlie Gibson that "I would look at raising the capital-gains tax for purposes of
fairness," even if hiking the tax would ultimately result in shrinking federal revenues.

It's galling that Obama thinks his definitions of "neighborliness" and "fairness" should be
codified into tax law while ignoring the possibility that others might not agree with his
personal interpretation of those words. Why should Obama's definitions carry more
weight than someone who believes that being a good neighbor and being fair means
supporting one low rate for everyone?

Sometimes we've wondered if Obama needs to be reminded that the U.S. is a republic,
not a commune. Now we are sure. His gross misunderstanding — or intended
misrepresentation — of what neighborliness means confirms it.

While it might be neighborly for the person "sitting pretty" to privately help the
minimum-wage-plus-tips waitress, there is nothing neighborly — or patriotic — about
using the coercive powers of the state to seize more of his legally earned income and to
interfere in personal affairs that are of no business to the government.

Nor is it particularly "neighborly" to increase the load on the top 1% of taxpayers who
shoulder 40% of the federal tax burden.

Just as "neighborliness" is a euphemistic way to talk about the forced redistribution of

wealth, "fairness" is code for punitively raising taxes on the economy's most successful
producers. Think about the Obama fairness comment and in what context it was made:
During a rant about "those who are able to work the stock market and amass huge
fortunes on capital gains . . . paying a lower tax rate than their secretaries."

If Obama is so deeply troubled by this tax rate inequity — which he perceives though it
doesn't actually exist — then why doesn't he propose to cut the secretary's taxes rather
than hiking taxes on the high-income earner? Wouldn't she appreciate being able to keep
more of her own money?

Isn't the financial payoff greater than the visceral pleasure she would supposedly feel
seeing the rich Wall Street guy gouged by a government guided by vindictive
individuals? Or is the secretary just one of those bitter people who doesn't deserve a tax
cut?

Obama's tale of the secretary and the stock market whiz recalls the efforts to create tax
harmonization by the European Union. Naturally, the socialist-minded nabobs at the EU
want to achieve harmony by raising tax rates in countries where they are low — and
where economies are growing — to meet the rates in nations where they are high — and
the economies stagnant. Logic would dictate that real harmony, and economic growth,
would be achieved by cutting all rates to those of the nation where they are the lowest.

Democrats have put themselves into the position in which they have to fuel resentment to
generate support. Who better to carry that banner than Chicago's Obama, a man
experienced as a "community organizer," immersed in class hatred by Saul Alinsky
(author of "Rules for Radicals") and dedicated to establishing a nanny socialist system in
which, according to his wife, Michelle, "Barack Obama will require you to work" and
"never allow you to go back to your lives as usual — uninvolved, uninformed."

If he's elected, America will become Obama's world and the rest of us will have to live in
it, subject to what he believes is neighborly and fair, and what Biden considers to be
patriotic.
Obama's McKnight In Shining Armor
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Monday, September 29, 2008 4:20 PM
PT

Election '08: Obama needed help getting into Harvard Law School. He got it from a
disciple of Saul Alinsky who shared the socialist agitator's belief in the radical change the
young community organizer could embrace.

IBD Series: The Audacity Of Socialism

Obama doesn't talk much about his years at Columbia University and Harvard Law other
than he attended both and was elected president of the Harvard Law Review. The reason
may be his records at both were, to say the least, undistinguished.

According to the New York Sun, university spokesman Brian Connolly confirmed that
Obama graduated from Columbia in 1983 with a major in political science but without
honors. What his grades were we do not know. As the New York Times reported,
"Obama declined repeated requests to talk about his New York years, release his
Columbia transcript or identify even a single fellow student co-worker, roommate or
friend from those years."

Seems like a job for those 30 people sent to Alaska to investigate Gov. Sarah Palin.

Harvard Law School is hard to get into, with some 7,000 applicants vying for about 500
seats. The LSAT scores required are usually in the 98th or 99th percentile range with
grade point averages between 3.80 and 3.95. If Obama's scores were that high, you'd
think we'd know them. But we don't.

Obama waited five years to apply to Harvard. As WorldNetDaily reports, from 1985 to
1988, he worked for a subsidiary of the Chicago-based Gamaliel Foundation, founded on
the principles of Saul "The Red" Alinsky. He worked as a consultant and trainer. On the
board of Gamaliel sat Northwestern University professor John L. McKnight, a student of
Alinsky's radical tactics. While at Gamaliel, McKnight became Obama's mentor in
community organizing.

As we have noted, when Obama worked for Gamaliel, he was paid by the Woods
Foundation, which supported the radical group. Obama would later serve on the Woods
Foundation board with terrorist and socialism advocate William Ayers. McKnight
schooled young Obama in the gospel according to Alinsky. He apparently saw much
promise in the budding politician, a way to advance Alinsky's radical socialist agenda
into the highest levels in government.
Obama had been ready to be radicalized. A revealing profile in 1995 in the Chicago
Reader, a far-left free weekly, tells of how the young Obama had fully rejected "the
unrealistic politics of integrationist assimilation." According to the profile, Obama said
he was "tired of seeing the moral fervor of black folks whipped up — at the speaker's
rostrum and from the pulpit — and then allowed to dissipate because there's no agenda,
no concrete program for change."

In his 1995 memoir, Obama said he wanted to go to Harvard Law School to "learn
power's currency in all its intricacy," with the goal of "making large-scale change" as a
national politician. But he needed to get there first. So Obama approached McKnight to
write a letter of recommendation, which he did.

Being tutored by McKnight and other Alinsky disciples, Obama said while campaigning
in Iowa last year, was "the best education I ever had, better than anything I got at Harvard
Law School."

Shortly before Obama entered Harvard, he praised McKnight and his organizing
principles in an article titled "After Alinsky: Community Organizing in Illinois." In it, he
called for more "power" to put in place "a systematic approach to community
organization." Power seems to be a recurring theme with Obama.

At Harvard, Obama took advanced training courses at the Industrial Areas Foundation, a
group founded by Alinsky and associated with Gamaliel. He certainly didn't spend much
time working on the Harvard Law Review. Obama contributed not one signed word to
the HLR or any other legal publication. As Matthew Franck has pointed out in National
Review Online, "A search of the HeinOnline database of law journals turns up exactly
nothing credited to Obama in any law review anywhere at any time."

Obama may have had other help getting into Harvard. As we and others have reported,
Manhattan Borough President Percy Sutton said on a New York cable station that he was
approached by Khalid al-Mansour, principle adviser to radical Saudi Prince Al-Waleed
bin Talal, to write a letter to Harvard on Obama's behalf. Both the Sutton family and the
Obama campaign have denied the veracity of 88-year-old Sutton's statements.

It is said knowledge is power. Power is what Obama has always sought, and he has
learned how to get it and use it at the feet of some of the most radical socialists in
America. Now he seeks the power of the presidency to organize every community of
America according to their agenda.
If Bailout Plan Is Too Socialistic, Just Wait For Obama
Leviathan
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Tuesday, September 30, 2008 4:20 PM
PT

Election '08: Have Americans been so lulled by Barack Obama's smooth talk that they
don't realize his plans would expand government into a massive socialist behemoth? His
is a soft-spoken, hard-left agenda.

IBD Series: The Audacity Of Socialism

During Friday night's debate in Mississippi, Obama disparaged what he called "this
notion that the market can always solve everything and that the less regulation we have,
the better off we're going to be."

But the subprime crisis Washington is dealing with is the result of three decades of the
federal government pressuring banks — via the regulatory demands of the Democrats'
1977 Community Reinvestment Act, which was expanded by Bill Clinton — to make
tens of billions of dollars in bad loans to poor people with lousy credit ratings.

It was Democrats' regulatory and litigious assaults upon the mortgage market in pursuit
of "social justice" that left our economy in its precarious position of today; indeed as an
attorney, Obama himself in 1994 represented a client suing Citibank, accusing it of
systematically denying mortgages to blacks.

But if the taxpayer rescue of Wall Street and Uncle Sam's taking over the banking system
scares you, the broader socialism planned by the Democratic presidential nominee should
leave you petrified.

Here are a few examples, with price tags provided by the National Taxpayers Union
Foundation:

• Politicized financial regulation: Obama would establish a Financial Market

Regulation and Oversight Commission to "end our balkanized framework of overlapping
and competing regulatory agencies" and "which would meet regularly and report to the
president, the president's financial working group and Congress on the state of our
financial markets and the systemic risks that face them."

Translation: more centralized and heavy-handed regulatory power over businesses for
Washington.
• Government-managed medicine: Even left-leaning health care experts concede that
Obama's expanded coverage plan will cost $100 billion; with no real cost containment,
that will mean a second wave of reform that could impose full socialized medicine on our
country.

Obama declares that "governments at all levels should lead the effort to develop a
national and regional strategy for public health, and align funding mechanisms to support
its implementation."

His plan also presumes racial discrimination, "requiring hospitals and health plans to
collect, analyze and report health care quality for disparity populations and holding them
accountable for any differences found."

• Community health centers: Your local doctor may become obsolete in Obama's brave
new world in which $6.7 billion will be spent over five years building "community health
centers" featuring "preventive, diagnostic and other primary care services."

• Antitrust enforcement: Promising this "is how we ensure that capitalism works for
consumers," a President Obama would "stop or restructure those mergers that are likely
to harm consumer welfare, while quickly clearing those that do not" and "working with
foreign governments to change unsound competition laws."

Behind this harmless-sounding rhetoric is the misguided belief that the government must
shield companies of its choosing from their competitors' lower prices and innovative
practices. Courts and government bureaucrats under Obama could be expected to use
antitrust to claim the existence of imaginary monopolies and squash mergers and other
business transactions.

• Required IRAs: Under Obama, "employers who do not currently offer a retirement
plan will be required to automatically enroll their employees in a direct deposit IRA
account."

Costing $292 billion annually, according to the NTUF's latest analysis, Obama's plans are
far more than just "change"; they would transfigure American society into full-blown
socialism. With little more than a month to go before this most consequential election,
voters seem not to appreciate the danger.

• Dictatorial energy policy: Obama would spend $150 billion over a decade "to advance
the next generation of biofuels and fuel infrastructure, accelerate the commercialization
of plug-in hybrids" and create other ways to force uneconomical forms of energy on the
auto and oil industry.

A Clean Technologies Deployment Venture Capital Fund would artificially finance the
environmentalist pet projects in which private investors have little faith.
Negating the global labor market, the Illinois senator also promises to "provide specific
tax assistance and loan guarantees to the domestic auto industry to ensure that new fuel-
efficient cars and trucks" are built within the U.S.

• Bullying utilities: The Chicago Democrat would require that 25% of electricity
consumed in the U.S. be "derived from clean, sustainable energy sources, like solar, wind
and geothermal by 2025." Unless those alternative sources get cheap fast, that likely
means a big escalation in consumers' electric bills.

Obama also proposes "to 'flip' incentives to state and local utilities by ensuring
companies get increased profits for improving energy efficiency, rather than higher
energy consumption."

• Billions for teachers unions: Instead of school choice for parents, in which
competition would improve public educations and give the poor access to private
education, Obama proposes "an accountability system that supports schools to improve,
rather than focuses on punishments."

His five-year, $90 billion education plan would dole out "a $200 million grant program
for states and districts that want to provide additional learning time for students in need,"
double federal funding for afterschool programs, provide "professional development and
coaching to school leaders, teachers and other school personnel," "develop multi-tiered
credentialing systems that encourage principals to grow professionally," and cook up
other ways to keep public school teachers on the clock longer.

Uncle Sam would also "collect evidence about how prospective teachers plan and teach
in the classroom" in an Obama administration.

• Required public service: In return for the federal government paying the first $4,000
of college tuition through a tax credit — which would be tough for most American
families to turn down — Obama would require recipients "to conduct 100 hours of public
service a year."

• Required sick leave: Spending $1.5 billion over five years, Obama would "encourage"
the states to adopt paid-leave systems that "guarantee workers seven days of paid sick
leave per year."

• Thought police: In what sounds like the outdated and unconstitutional Fairness
Doctrine on steroids, Obama would "encourage diversity in the ownership of broadcast
media, promote the development of new media outlets for expression of diverse
viewpoints, and clarify the public interest obligations of broadcasters who occupy the
nation's spectrum."

What would the "public interest obligations" of liberal Democrats' opponents within the
media end up being in an Obama administration?
• Green Corps: Barack Obama would spend $390 million over five years to fund "an
energy-focused Green Jobs Corps to engage disconnected and disadvantaged youth . . . to
improve the energy efficiency of homes and buildings in their communities, while also
providing them with practical skills and experience in important career fields of expected
high-growth employment."

It's a quasi-paramilitary organization dedicated to environmentalism that promises

inductees that they would be getting practical employment training for future "green
jobs."

• Teaching parents parenting: The senator would spend $300 million over five years
establishing "Promise Neighborhoods in cities that have high levels of poverty and crime
and low levels of student academic achievement." A key feature would be "parenting
schools for parents."

• Housebuilding army: the Youthbuild program would be expanded from 8,000 to

50,000 over eight years at a cost of $257 million to "construct and rehabilitate affordable
housing for low-income and homeless families."

• Patent reform: Obama's idea of "opening up the patent process to citizen review"
would make it much tougher for businesses to challenge the government's judgment on
the ownership rights of an invention, which will have a negative effect on the incentives
to innovate.

• Private parklands regulation: Obama would "do more to encourage private citizens to
protect the open spaces and forests they own and the endangered species that live there . .
. and encourage communities to enhance local greenspace, wildlife and conservation
areas."

The Obama campaign uses the word "encourage" over and over in numerous areas of
policy. Expect it to be the form of encouragement practiced by Don Corleone — making
you an offer you can't refuse.

• Autism czar: If you weren't convinced that the Democratic nominee intends to use the
federal government's powers to solve every known problem, consider his promise to
spend $2.5 billion over four years on appointment of an "Autism Czar" to "ensure that all
federal funds are being spent in a manner that prioritizes results."
Ayers Has Not Left Radicalism Behind
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Thursday, October 09, 2008 4:20 PM PT

Election '08: Bill Ayers isn't out bombing anymore, but he has never stopped being a
radical. His ties to hostile Marxist regimes remain, raising more questions about Barack
Obama's refusal to fully repudiate him.

IBD Series: The Audacity Of Socialism

Distancing himself, as Obama did, from the "detestable acts" of the founder of the
Weather Underground terror organization, is one thing. Ayers' terror attacks — in armed
robbery, police murder, attempted killings of U.S. troops, and bombings of U.S.
democratic institutions to advance a Marxist revolution — were quite easy to disavow.

But Ayers' supporters say his violence was all a long time ago.

Obama emphasized that his friend's terror acts happened "when I was eight years old."
Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley told the New York Times last week "he's done a lot of
good in this city and nationally." He added: "This is 2008. People make mistakes. You
judge a person by his whole life."

But a look at Ayers' whole life suggests he hasn't changed much more than his tactics.
He's still the same radical he always was.

Ayers' terrorist acts in the 1970s didn't just blow in out of nowhere. Ayers moved to
urban guerrilla violence after finding Tom Hayden's riot-prone Students for a Democratic
Society too tame. He was inspired by the Cuban revolution of Fidel Castro, who toppled
a democracy a decade earlier.

Ayers' Weathermen were part of a broad upsurge of Marxist guerrilla movements across
the hemisphere, using similar tactics to establish Cuba-style regimes. These children of
the rich infiltrated universities and spread violence against the "establishment," just as
Ayers did.

At the time Ayers was targeting the Pentagon, Argentina's communist ERP began terror
attacks in 1969, triggering a Dirty War by 1976. Brazil's MR-8 shot police and kidnapped
a U.S. ambassador in 1969. In Colombia, the FARC unleashed terror in 1966, and the M-
19 was born in 1970. Uruguay's Tupamaros began bombing and kidnapping in 1970.
Peru's Shining Path started university agitation in 1973 and full-blown war by 1980. The
Weather Underground, founded in 1969, was the same leftist revolution, U.S.-style.
Operating underground, Ayers' Weathermen aligned closely with Castro's Cuba, which
aided Marxist terror groups. Some Weathermen on the run found asylum in Havana;
others, like Mark Rudd, were trained by the KGB there. Cuba helped Weathermen on the
lam by letting them secretly pass messages through Cuba's embassy in Canada, says FBI
informant Larry Grathwohl.

Like many at the time, Ayers was a child of privilege from a wealthy family who got
away with his crimes at a time when the West had lost its will. "Guilty as sin, free as a
bird — America is a great country," Ayers taunted after walking free on a technicality.

Ayers is too smart to continue bombing, but remains a "revolutionary" through other
means. He remains proud of his violent past and alignment with America's enemies.

"I don't regret setting bombs," he famously told the New York Times. "I feel we didn't do
enough." His terrorist past reviled here, he's found a welcome embrace in Hugo Chavez's
Venezuela.

Obama says he barely knows him, but in the years when he was meeting and serving
together on the Annenberg Challenge and the Woods Fund, as well as launching his
career with a fundraiser in Ayers' Che Guevara-festooned house, Ayers made at least four
Marxist pilgrimages to Caracas to praise Chavez's dictatorial regime.

He sits on the board of a Venezuelan government think tank called Miranda International
Center, focused on bringing Cuba-style education to Venezuelan school children.

Recent polls show this turning of schools toward Marxist indoctrination terrifies average
Venezuelans. Venezuelan dissidents also accuse Miranda of rewriting constitutions in
South America to grant leftist leaders absolute power, with some saying Ayers had a role
in 2007's effort to give Chavez total power inside Venezuela.

It's not surprising. Ayers' violent methods may have influenced Chavez's rise to power in
1998. Like Ayers' terrorists, Chavez's campaign began with Weather Underground-style
hijackings of bank trucks. At the same time, captured computer documents show that
Chavez took $150,000 from FARC while in prison.

Ayers' Miranda biography calls him "leader of the revolutionary and anti-imperialist
group The Weather Underground which initiated armed struggle against the government
of the USA for more than 10 years from the heart of the empire."

It continues: "Now, he's a professor of education and executive researcher of the

University of Illinois in Chicago. He's developed courses around urban reform of schools,
problems of capitalist education, and research. He is the author or editor of more than 11
books, including a memoir titled Fugitive Days on the struggle against the government of
the United States."
In other words, education isn't the best credential for this supposedly distinguished
professor — his terrorist past is.

It's a good guess that his biography on the Miranda site was written by Ayers himself.
Ayers' Miranda peers are a soup of the international far left: a FARC apologist from
Colombia, a Che-crazy UCLA professor named Peter McLaren, and activist Eva
Golinger, who was closely tied to Philip Agee, the fugitive CIA traitor who died earlier
this year in Havana.

Meanwhile, Ayers' stepson Chesa Boudin has close Venezuelan ties, too. He identified
himself as a foreign-policy adviser intern to Venezuela's government in 2005. He had an
office next to Chavez's own in the presidential palace. Not surprising, since Boudin's
grandfather is Fidel Castro's personal attorney, and his mother is jailed Weather
Underground terrorist Kathy Boudin. His family ties give him street cred to communists.

This, then, is Bill Ayers.

Obama claims he had no idea about his terrorist past when he met him, and hasn't talked
to him since 2005.

But with the association going back to the 1980s and Ayers making no secret of his
radical views, this is hard to believe.

Given glowing profiles of Ayers and his past in the Chicago Tribune, as writer Jonah
Goldberg found, and Ayers' radical agenda in education and philanthropy while Obama
and Ayers served on charitable projects, it's hard to imagine anything but a deep bond.

The reality is, either Obama is naive or he doesn't care that Ayers remains an anti-
American radical who would hurt his country.

His ties to the rising radicalism in Latin America continue. Could anything be more
useful to Chavez than to have someone like Ayers as a go-between with a U.S. president?
Obama still has repudiated only Ayers' past terrorist actions. What about his present?
Defining Problems With Socialism For The Post-Cold
War Generation
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Monday, October 27, 2008 4:20 PM PT

Election '08: John McCain has finally called Barack Obama's agenda by its proper name.
But if he assumes voters understand what he means when he uses the word "socialism,"
he assumes too much.

IBD Series: The Audacity Of Socialism

To slap a label on it isn't enough. Sadly, most people under 60 in this country went to
schools and universities where socialism isn't considered a bad thing.

McCain has to educate them about what socialists believe and how they want to rebuild
"the world as it should be," as Obama quotes his socialist hero, Saul Alinsky.

In this final week of the campaign, McCain should draw contrasts between socialism and
capitalism and free enterprise. He should also explain in detail what economic freedoms
are at risk if liberal socialists get their way in reshaping the country from both ends of
Pennsylvania Avenue.

McCain has smartly seized on Obama's revealing side-comment to Joe the Plumber about
his plan to "spread the wealth around." The GOP hopeful says it smacks of socialism, and
he's right. But socialist sympathizers in the punditry have pooh-poohed his sound bites as
passe or even racist.

Newsweek's Jonathan Alter, for example, argued that socialism no longer has the evil
connotation it had during the Cold War, when the right used it to bludgeon the left.
Kansas City Star columnist Lewis Diuguid, meanwhile, dismissed the "socialist" label as
merely a "code word for black."

Many economists would equate what Obama has in mind with socialism. Among them is
the late F.A. Hayek, a one-time socialist, who wrote a book on the dangers of socialism
titled "The Road to Serfdom." When it debuted in the final days of WWII, socialism
unambiguously meant the state control of the means of production and central economic
planning.

But decades later, in a new preface, the Nobel Prize winner wrote that "socialism has
come to mean chiefly the extensive redistribution of incomes through taxation and the
institutions of the welfare state." Yes, that's Obama's economic plan.
He concluded that even this softer socialism means reduced economic liberties,
opportunities and living standards for all.

According to Marxist theory, socialism is the stage between capitalism and communism
where private wealth is distributed for the benefit of all. It's a romantic notion because
hardly anyone is willing to share their wealth with strangers.

So to get from theory to practice, force must be used. Wealth must be taken by the state
— and not by a faceless bureaucratic machine, but rather by flawed humans with their
own selfish ambitions and ulterior motives. They decide who gets what, taking cuts for
themselves and their cronies in the process.

Think ex-Fannie Mae CEO Franklin Raines and ACORN.

Socialism is centralized power. That's why socialist movements, which often begin as
cults of personality, usually end in fascism. Witness Stalinism, Maoism, Castroism —
and, yes, Nazism, which, as Hayek noted, stands for "National Socialism."

Again, almost every major society that started with socialism has ended badly. Socialism
has been refuted repeatedly, yet that hasn't stopped neo-Marxists — hiding now behind
the title "community organizer" — from dreaming their dreams of collective sacrifice for
collective good.

They see capitalism with its profit motive as vulgar and immoral because it's at odds with
altruism — the idea that the general welfare of society is the proper goal of individuals.

What they fail to realize is society is the greatest beneficiary of our system of rational
self-interest. The poorest of the poor and the laziest of the lazy still benefit from the
genius of the entrepreneur and the risk-taking of the venture capitalist.

Almost every modern-day invention, from lifesaving drugs to computer software, was
inspired by profit, not public welfare. Yet everyone shares in the greater efficiencies, cost
savings, life expectancies and job opportunities created by the inspiration and
perspiration of money-hungry individuals.

No system in history has created more wealth, per capita, over a shorter time than
unbridled American capitalism.

In fact, America has led what economist Angus Maddison calls the "capitalist epoch" —
a 17-decade period in which workers saw their hours cut in half and life expectancy
doubled. In a seminal study last decade, Maddison calculated the aggregate output and
population growth in the U.S. and 15 other advanced capitalist nations since 1820. He
found a 14-fold explosion in combined per capita product, dwarfing the living standards
of communist and other nations.
Ignoring this history, the left uses the current financial crisis to redefine capitalism as
"dangerous" to the welfare of mankind, and to justify greater government economic
controls.

"Market capitalism is a dangerous tool, like a machine gun or a chainsaw or a nuclear

reactor," former Clinton budget chief Alice Rivlin last week told Democratic Rep.
Barney Frank's finance committee. And she's a moderate in her party.

The left wrongly asserts that unregulated capitalism caused the financial crisis; in fact,
government overregulation of banks distorted market incentives and corrupted capitalism.

Wielding a socialist-inspired cudgel called the Community Reinvestment Act,

government forced banks to make loans to uncreditworthy minorities who couldn't repay
them.

It didn't matter that banks weren't racist. The assumption was they might be, and it was
government's role to enforce "fairness." The same assumptions are made about the rich.

"The problems of poverty and racism, the uninsured and the unemployed are . . . rooted
in societal indifference and individual callousness — the desire among those at the top of
the social ladder to maintain their wealth and status whatever the cost," Obama wrote in
his 2006 autobiography. "Solving these problems will require changes in government
policy."

In other words, people get rich on the backs of the poor, even take from the poor. It's
therefore up to the state to take from the rich and give to the poor. In a feudal or colonial
society, such a sentiment might be noble. But capitalism is a system in which one person
lives well and another person lives better.

The idea that whole classes of people are exploited or oppressed in this country is a
figment of the left's class-obsessed imagination. And it's refuted by Federal Reserve data
showing constant income mobility even between the lowest and highest quintiles. Policy
shouldn't be built on such fantasy.

Still, Obama insists that spreading the wealth is "good for everybody." But as the rich
shelter capital or reduce their work to avoid higher taxes, all Obama will end up
"spreading" is poverty and all he'd redistribute is more power to Washington.

He argues that raising taxes is not socialism, and he's right: By itself, it is not. But it is
socialism when the motive is "for purposes of fairness," as Obama explains it, which is
simply class-warfare jargon for punishing the rich.

"Was John McCain a socialist when he opposed the Bush tax cuts?" Obama asks. No,
McCain wanted spending cuts first. His motive was fiscal restraint, not restraint on
society's most productive members. Obama further argues that redistributing wealth to
the needy is better than redistributing it to greedy bankers as the Bush administration has
done. Actually, both policies are wrong, since both favor groups over individuals.

Obama denies having socialist designs. But it's no coincidence he virtually always votes
with socialist pal Bernie Sanders, as the two most liberal members of the Senate.

Nor is it a coincidence that nearly all of Obama's mentors and close advisers supported
Marxism, including: James Cone, Dwight Hopkins, Jeremiah Wright, Frank Marshall
Davis, Jim Wallis, John McKnight, Cornel West and William Ayers.

It's also no coincidence that Obama devoted his first memoir to the memory of his late
father, a communist, who proposed massive taxes and redistribution of income in Kenya.

"What is more important is to find means by which we can redistribute our economic
gains to the benefit of all," wrote Barack Hussein Obama Sr., a Harvard-educated
economist, in a 1965 policy paper. "This is the government's obligation."

Make no mistake: Sen. Obama isn't a liberal in the tradition of Jimmy Carter or John
Kerry. He envisions a bloodless socialism, where IRS agents take wealth and where the
Justice Department dictates contracts between labor and management.

But while force isn't used for murder, it's force nonetheless. And it does violence to the
American promise of a right to pursue your own life, your own riches and your own
happiness without government interference. America promises a chance at success, yet
Obama and other neo-Marxists twist that to mean America guarantees success through
equal outcomes, and that it's government's role to do the equalizing.

"What would help minority workers," Obama wrote in 2006, "are tax laws that restore
some balance to the distribution of the nation's wealth."

"It may sound noble to say, 'Damn economics, let us build up a decent world,' but it is, in
fact, merely irresponsible," Hayek wrote. "Our only chance of building a decent world is
that we can continue to improve the general level of wealth."

If Obama wins, he can claim a national mandate for his socialist agenda. If he gets a
filibuster-proof majority of Democrats in the Senate, he might get major planks in that
radical agenda passed in the first 100 days. It's shaping up as a battle between those who
create wealth and those who loot it.