The Young, The Old and The Truth

For as long as I can remember, there has been a divide between the young and the old. Middle aged men decry the waste of youth on the young and the young respond in kind; accusing the old men of stubbornness and of being single minded or worse, senile. Many have dismissed these difficulties as unavoidable noting that the old and young will always be at odds because the old have been tempered with the scars, bruises and pains of harsh experience and the young see the world in the simplest terms because their dreams have not been tested against brutal reality.

This is partially true. Plato wrote about the hardships parents had with their teenagers more than two thousand years ago and some of Shakespeare’s greatest works were centered on the passion of the young pitted against the blindness of their parents. The young look at our old photos, hear us talk about record players and black and white television and eventually argue that their meager experiences were earned in far more complex times than their parents knew and therefore, their experiences are at least equal, if not superior to those earned in the veritable stone age that their parents grew up in. The real shame is that these passionate young people don’t know how much they don’t know.

This is not to say that they are not capable individuals; many are highly intelligent and motivated and will invariably become the next generation of leaders. They are politically active and genuinely want to contribute to making America a better place. Their ideology is based largely on what they have learned in school, college and through a deeply flawed news media. If they only knew how much of the truth has been kept from them in order to shape their opinions and tenants, they might actually have very different ideas. In fact, I would bet that a wave of anger would sweep through the younger generations if they ever found out that they were being played as pawns by a group of globalist elitists far older and cynical than they ever imagined their parents to be.

The real game and the ultimate battleground is information. At first, only conservative leaning news organs, mostly Fox, would dare speak out against the President and his agenda. The Obama administration responded to those unflattering stories by dismissing Fox as not being a “real” news network. That worked for a while but now other networks and news outlets have started to come out of the ether and harsh criticisms have begun to seep into the coverage offered by CNN, MSNBC and even the L.A. Times! In order to counter the negative stories that have recently been taking a toll on Obama’s ratings, the President actually told a group of graduating students that too much information can be a distraction. After all, he couldn’t very well say that all of those media giants have somehow slipped out of the mainstream and have relinquished their status as “real” news networks simply because their coverage of him has become something less than the adoration he once enjoyed. Of course the real question is will those students heed the President’s advice or will they begin to ask themselves why an American President would suggest that public disregard any information and simply rely on official government sources?

In the past, even our most sinister Presidents were politically savvy enough to avoid hinting that they sought to actively control information. While they may have been silent on the issue, sadly, their records are rife with actions to sanitize not only the news, but history itself. Entire pieces of American history have been carefully scrubbed out of the text books and curriculum the American students see from the moment they walk into first grade right on through their college years. Fortunately, with the internet the truth is still out there but before you can find it, you have to know the right questions to ask.

The purge began in earnest during the Progressive Era of the early 20th century. Woodrow Wilson, a Progressive Democrat, saw to it that school text books were cleared of all information pertaining to African American patriots that fought and died as heroes in the American Revolution. Wilson actually went further than that; purging blacks from Federal jobs and in segregating the military. Isn’t it funny how those little tidbits of history are curiously left out of the studies of Woodrow Wilson? In fact, anything that doesn’t portray Progressivism as an enlightened and benevolent ideology is similarly struck from the public record. Of course, if you perform a simple Google search about Wilson’s segregation of the military, the elimination of blacks from civil service or the editing of school books during his administration; suddenly, pages and pages of documents begin to appear.

These students have been taught to believe that America was a bigoted nation founded on the belief that black slaves, and even white women, were denied basic rights by a ruling class of elderly white men. They have been taught that the three-fifths rule proves this legitimized racism when the Constitution was drafted with a provision that slaves represented only three-fifths of a human being. Would these students be surprised to know that more than five thousand African Americans fought side by side with whites in the Revolution; many serving with historical distinction. That is until Wilson’s school book purge made that information unavailable to students.

Would they be amazed to know that an African American was one of the first patriots killed in the Boston massacre and that many more would die a hero’s death in every major battle of the war? Would they be shocked to learn that not only did New England elect America’s first black judge during the early 1790’s but that he was continually re-elected, eventually serving for over forty years? Would they believe that America’s first black Speaker of the United States House of Representatives had been seated in 1869? Suddenly, this doesn’t sound like the history of a racist nation at all.

So what of the evil three-fifths rule? What the learned professors at our most lauded colleges will not tell their students is that the three-fifths rule was a carefully crafted strategy designed to deny the slave States governmental representation that included the full measure of the number of slaves they held. Even though the Northern States were populated with more citizens, slaves were few and far between. If it were not for the three-fifths rule, the Southern States would have enjoyed a sufficient majority within the House of Representatives to guarantee slavery in perpetuity simply by buying more slaves.

The young are also being taught that Capitalism has failed and the free market is only a tool used by the rich to retain their wealth. How the free market can be fairly judged when Progressive giants like Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt have instituted Federal programs and policies that have strangled the free market for nearly one hundred years is beyond me. Ask anyone educated in the public school system in the last fifty years and they will tell you that FDR ended the Great Depression through a myriad of government programs that stimulated employment and bolstered the economy. The truth is that after ten years of government intervention, there was no measurable improvement in either the unemployment rate or any of the leading economic indicators of the day. It was World War Two that ended the Great Depression, not FDR.

The other economic factor that has been totally eliminated from the realm of academic study is the Depression of 1920. Whenever I mention the Depression of 1920 most will immediately say “No, it was 1929.” The Depression of 1920 that followed the fiscal mismanagement of the Wilson administration has been nearly eradicated from all discussion because the facts surrounding that financial disaster are devastating to the neo-socialist beliefs of modern Progressives. While FDR struggled with funding one massive government program after another to stave off the effects of the Great Depression, President Warren Harding halved government spending and cut taxes by nearly 75%. The end result? Roosevelt’s depression lingered for over a decade until World War Two changed the balance of industrial power in the world while the economic policies of Warren Harding revitalized the American economy, ending his depression in a brief two years; giving us the halcyon days of the “Roaring Twenties”. As an interesting note, the depression of 1929 is considered to be a direct result of the damage wrought to the economy when Calvin Coolidge left much of the economic and regulatory policy decisions up to Progressive activist, Herbert Hoover; then, Coolidge’s secretary of Commerce. Hoover then drove the final nails in our economic coffin when he assumed the Presidency in 1929 and completed his work of undoing the Harding tax and spending cuts.

All of these facts and more are out there for anyone that will take off their blinders and dares to seek the information for themselves. The President is wrong about information. It is not distracting; it is liberating. So long as America is free, the truth remains a potent reminder of the incredible genius of the founding fathers and the best laid path to our future prosperity as a nation. If these future leaders let that liberty slip away; if they allow Socialist Professors to ignore history and Washington bureaucrats to erode the Constitution, then the light of truth will be extinguished forever. Orwell warned that he who controls the present controls the past and he who controls the past controls the future. Don’t take my word for any of this. These facts may no longer be taught in American schools but they are still available to those who seek the truth. However, if we allow this “fundamental transformation” of America to continue unabated, those truths may be lost for all time and with them, our place in the world as a free people.

Paul

The Roots of Socialism in America

I listen to students and young people comment on politics or society and wonder “how could they possibly believe what they are saying?” It dawned on me that to be able to draw reasonable conclusions, these young minds would have to have been properly educated and have access to all of the facts and not just the select few that suit the political agenda of the educator. While frustrating, there are reasons for this apparent lack of common sense.

The roots of socialism in America are found much as they were in Europe; a revolt against the harsh working conditions of the industrial revolution. It was Karl Marx, a philosopher, political economist, historian, political theorist, sociologist, communist and revolutionary, whose ideas are credited as the foundation of modern communism. Marx summarized his approach in the first line of the first chapter of The Communist Manifesto, published in 1848: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”

Marx argued that capitalism, like previous socioeconomic systems, will inevitably produce internal tensions which will lead to its destruction. Just as capitalism replaced feudalism, he believed socialism would, in turn, replace capitalism, and lead to a stateless, classless society called pure communism. This would emerge after a transitional period called the "dictatorship of the proletariat": a period sometimes referred to as the "workers state" or "workers' democracy".

While Marx remained a relatively obscure figure in his own lifetime, his ideas began to exert a major influence on workers' movements shortly after his death. This influence gained added impetus with the victory of the Marxist Bolsheviks in the Russian October Revolution in 1917, and few parts of the world remained significantly untouched by Marxian ideas in the course of the twentieth century.

Teddy Roosevelt would never be known as a Socialist but he did espouse many ideas that were Socialist in nature. He considered himself a progressive and while he did believe in American Imperialism and a strong world military presence, he also believed in heavy government regulation, government control of wages and the redistribution of wealth for the public good.

On the heels of the Russian Revolution, Communist and Socialist movements found an audience in the American Labor movement. The Socialist Party of America was a coalition of local parties based in industrial cities. Even though by 1912 they claimed more than a thousand locally elected officials in 33 states and 160 cities, the party was factionalized. The conservatives, led by Victor Berger, promoted progressive causes of efficiency and an end to corruption. The radicals wanted to overthrow capitalism, tried to infiltrate labor unions, and sought to cooperate with The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). With few exceptions the party had weak or nonexistent links to local labor unions.

Once the stock market collapsed in 1929 forcing enormous numbers of people into unemployment, the communists surged once again and began to organize rallies and marches in support of workers and workers rights. In March, 1930, hundreds of thousands of unemployed workers marched through New York City, Detroit, Washington, San Francisco and other cities in a mass protest organized by the Communist Party’s Unemployed Councils. In 1931, more than 400 relief protests erupted in Chicago and that number grew by 150 in 1932. The leadership behind these organizations often came from radical groups like Communists and Socialists, who wanted to organize “unfocused neighborhood militancy into organized popular defense organizations.” Workers turned to these radical groups until organized labor became more active in 1932, with the passage of the Norris-La Guardia Act.

While Communists and Socialists did gain a foothold in these turbulent years, Walter Philip Reuther the president of the United Auto Workers (UAW) would soon change that. As a prominent figure in the anti-Communist left, he was a founder of the Americans for Democratic Action in 1947. He had left the Socialist party in 1939, and throughout the 1950s and 1960s was a leading spokesman for liberal interests in the CIO and in the Democratic Party.

Labor unions eventually eliminated the public connections between the unions, Communism and Socialism. They traded those links for something less troubling in the public eye, the progressive arm of the Democratic Party which espoused many of the same ideals as Socialists without the negative connotations; what some would call “Communism light”. Now the real work to transform the nation could begin under the American flag and right under the noses of the American people.

Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader 1958 to 1964, had once made a statement is a speech saying that he would “bury” America. Some thought that meant that he meant military action or that he would launch a nuclear attack to bring about his prophecy. That raised even more fear among average Americans during the cold war even though war was hardly his intention.

Khrushchev was perfectly willing to let America move to the left incrementally; here a little, there a little. When speaking about FDR’s New Deal, Khrushchev said, "We can't expect the American people to jump from capitalism to communism, but we can assist their elected leaders in giving them small doses of socialism, until they awaken one day to find that they have communism.”

Changing terminology and calling socialist programs “compassionate conservativism” doesn’t change the nature of the beast itself. Redistributing the wealth to win votes will produce the same devastating end as redistributing the wealth because you are an outright socialist.

From 1959 until 1989, the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) received a substantial subsidy from the Soviet Union. Starting with $75,000 in 1959 this was increased gradually to $3 million in 1987. This substantial amount reflected the Party's subservience to the Moscow.

Yuri Alexandrovic Bezmenov, now known as Tomas David Schuman, was born in 1939 in the former Soviet Union and worked as a journalist for Pravda. In this capacity, he secretly answered to the KGB. His true job was to further the aims of communist Russia After being assigned to a station in India, Bezmenov eventually grew to love the people and culture of India, while, at the same time, he began to resent the KGB-sanctioned oppression of intellectuals who dissented from Moscow's policies. He decided to defect to the West.

Bezmenov/Schuman is best remembered for his Pro-American Anti-communist lectures and books from the 1980s. From his writings and speeches Mr. Bezmenov said: “Ideological subversion is the process which is legitimate and open. You can see it with your own eyes.... It has nothing to do with espionage. I know that intelligence gathering looks more romantic.... That's probably why your Hollywood producers are so crazy about James Bond types of films. But in reality the main emphasis of the KGB is NOT in the area of intelligence at all. According to my opinion, and the opinions of many defectors of my caliber, only about 15% of time, money, and manpower is spent on espionage as such. The other 85% is a slow process which we call either ideological subversion, active measures, or psychological warfare. What it basically means is: to change the perception of reality of every American that despite of the abundance of information no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interest of defending themselves, their families, their community, and their country.

It's a great brainwashing process which goes very slow and is divided into four basic stages. The first one being "demoralization". It takes from 15 to 20 years to demoralize a nation. Why that many years? Because this is the minimum number of years required to educate one generation of students in the country of your enemy exposed to the ideology of [their] enemy. In other words, Marxism-Leninism ideology is being pumped into the soft heads of at least three generation of American students without being challenged or counterbalanced by the basic values of Americanism; American patriotism.

The result? The result you can see ... the people who graduated in the 60's, dropouts or half-baked intellectuals, are now occupying the positions of power in the government, civil service, business, mass media, and educational systems. You are stuck with them. You can't get through to them. They are contaminated. They are programmed to think and react to certain stimuli in a certain pattern. You cannot change their mind even if you expose them to authentic information. Even if you prove that white is white and black is black, you still can not change the basic perception and the logic of behavior.”

Thanks to the soviet doctrine in “ideological subversion”, America now has over 10,000 avowed socialist professors teaching in our universities that continue the practice of indoctrination. We also have over 70 members of Congress that consider themselves socialists or progressive socialists. In fact, Henry Waxman and Ed Markey, the authors of the Climate Bill (cap and trade) are two of the Progressive Socialists in Congress which a great reason to oppose that Bill all by itself.

Paul

So Now it's Obama the Educator?

In his radio address this past Saturday, the President announced that he plans to overhaul the No Child Left Behind Act or NCLB. The act was originally proposed by the Bush administration and ushered through the legislature by Senator Ted Kennedy. Signed into law on January 8, 2002, NCLB was intended to raise student performance by establishing higher standards and establishing incremental goals to meet those standards.

The Department of Education claims success with the program in reports prepared using a series of statistics gathered by the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP). The reports show statistical gains in every measured area and an improvement in the parity of test scores between different demographic groups. These encouraging numbers may simply be arranged to justify the more than 40% increase in NCLB funding since its inception.

Critics state that the statistics quoted by the NAEP are intentionally misleading as they were comparisons between 2005 and 2000 test scores. Even though NCLB had not been implemented until 2003, the rate of improvement measured from 2000 to 2003 was the same as the rate of improvement between 2003 and 2005 proving that NCLB had little if anything to do with the improvement. The incentive and penalty structure under NCLB fostered conditions that encouraged schools to manipulate test data to “create” the appearance of progress by lowering local test standards to continually show improved scores. With the same rate of improvement shown in the years after the implementation of NCLB as there was in the years preceding it, critics claim that schools that relaxed standards to show an improvement were in fact, concealing a very real decline in their students proficiency to avoid NCLB penalties.

The only argument to keep NCLB alive is that the Teacher’s unions (NEA and AFT) despised it and most of what the teacher's unions fight against is usually bad for the union and good for the students. Imagine the nerve of setting education standards! Actually, the original proposal for NCLB went even further and called for proficiency tests for instructors to determine their effectiveness. Of course, the unions howled at the idea of teachers proving they could actually teach and Congress relented, gutted this requirement which I believe was the single most important part of NCLB; the part they may have actually made it work.

So now the President wants to reform the No Child Left Behind Act. In his radio address he said he would disclose his plans on Monday. I’m a little confused here. Obama said after the election of Scott Brown that his administration would now focus on the state of the economy but he’s still wrapped up in the healthcare debate, has hinted at renewing the push for his energy bill (cap and trade) and now this? Since the President heavily favors unions, I am sure his reforms will eliminate some of the provisions that the NEA still hates about NCLB such as school choice or funding for advanced tutoring. After all, money spent on students so it is no longer available to feather the nests of unionized teachers. I am sure Obama will offer platitudes to parents about increased accountability and higher standards but those provisions were already in NCLB and didn’t work the first time.

The school choice provision currently forces schools to provide access to other schools that post higher achievements, provide extra tutoring or special after school programs for any student that has failed to improve for two consecutive years. To a Progressive bent on the redistribution of wealth, otherwise known as stealing from those that earn to give it to those that don’t, reformation of the NCLB is a golden opportunity to make the case to funnel large sums of money into inner city schools to make them “better” rather than forcing that school to use resources to transfer failing students to schools that have a measurable record of success.

Of course, a large number of failing schools are loaded with unionized teachers and reside in areas represented by the friends of BHO. Anything that can be done to keep money in those schools would be a big plus for a former community organizer and would help cement his support in those critical areas. It’s a legal mean way to buy volunteers and votes as local groups and teachers rally to support the man that is supporting them. This was the reason that the founding fathers placed their trust in the communities and not the Federal government where education was concerned. The Constitution provides no authority for the Federal government to interfere with State education standards but to Progressives, that is just a minor difficulty. After all, since the days of Theodore Roosevelt, the Federal government has found some very interesting ways to elude the enumerated powers act that severely limited the scope and power of the Federal government.

Like lobsters in a pot, we watched as the Federal government created one agency after another by manipulation of the commerce clause and through a liberal interpretation of providing for the “general welfare” of the United States. Even a rudimentary examination of the Federalist Papers proves that the general welfare of the United States referred only to the welfare of the Union of States and not some hidden authority for the Federal government to provide directly for the people; the authority to act in the interest of the citizens, including education, was clearly supposed to remain forever with the individual sovereign States and directly in the hands of the electorate of those States.

Instead, the Federal government increased the tax burden on the American people, drawing money from the economy that could then be redirected to the States as grants. Of course those grants had quite a few strings attached to them. Since the Federal government could not pass laws that mandated the States to do much of anything within their own borders, the standards that the Federal government wished to impose were written into grant applications as a provision of the grant. If you wanted Federal highway money then you had to agree to Federal speed limits; if you want health and hospital funds you had to agree to a partial funding of Medicaid and if you want education funds, you had to agree to Federal education standards. In short, if they couldn’t control these things through direct legislation, they would control them by buying support through the grant process.

The current Progressive tax system is the most insidious device ever created by the Progressive underground. The burden on the American people is now so great that the individual States can no longer increase taxes to fund the programs that are important to their own citizens. In order to provide those programs, the States are forced to accept one Federal mandate after another to receive the maximum amount of government largess or be forced to pare back essential services within their own communities.

Here we are again, being forced into yet another corner as the President prepares to unveil his “reform” of Federal education edicts. So far, every incursion this President has taken into the education system has been met with horror. The speech he had scheduled for the opening of the new school year in 2009 created a fire storm of controversy as we discovered the materials the Department of Education had distributed to the school districts to accompany his speech. The materials were basically study guides to the speech that encouraged students to identify ways they could help the President move his agenda forward. Such blatant attempts at politicizing our schools have always been forbidden and they knew that. That is why they chose to keep the speech a secret until the weekend before it was schedule to be delivered. Truthfully, I think that since parents found out about the “study guides” the speech had to be re-written at the last moment and that is what caused the delay in its release.

Then there was the call for school aged “volunteers” to act as organizers in our high schools and community colleges. These organizers would create groups in the schools that would also garner the support of the students for the President’s agenda. The application process was administrated through the President’s own website and was only made public after the application process had expired and the applications themselves were removed from the site.

There is ample cause for concern anytime this man wants to be involved in education and I am highly suspect of his sudden interest in reforming NCLB. Let’s face it; totalitarian leaders like Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini and Mao, to name just a few, have always turned to the schools first as they attempted to “transform” their nations and their societies. That is where the impressionable and unprejudiced minds reside. The minds that with some simple and cost effective “nudging” had become the brutal guardians of the new regime just as the fearless leader had expected.

Paul