How (and Why) Obama has Impeded Recovery

By Alan Caruba

During and after his 2008 campaign, Barack Obama was hailed as the second coming of Franklin D. Roosevelt. History records that Roosevelt presided over the Great Depression, begun in the previous administration of Herbert Hoover who got most of the blame. Roosevelt’s policies extended it well beyond the normal recovery from a recession.

In his book, “Dupes”, historian Paul Kengor, wrote “Roosevelt won in a landslide in November 1932. To liberals and traditional Democrats everywhere, he was more than just a new face at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. He was a kind of political savior at the most desperate time in their lives.”

Roosevelt was immediately assailed by the Communist Party USA as he launched his New Deal stew of programs intended to reverse the effects of the economic crisis. As Kengor notes, “No president had ever moved so far to the left, and so quickly, but it was not enough for the comrades.” They portrayed Roosevelt “as a warmonger bent on wreaking havoc on the poor USSR (Soviet Russia)” because they feared the U.S. might go to war against it.

As we now know, some of Roosevelt’s closest advisors were either Communists or extremely sympathetic to Communism. Harry Hopkins was one of them and was later exposed as a likely Soviet agent. The Venona transcripts of secret communications between U.S. Communists and their Soviet handlers revealed this.

Obama came into office following the 2008 financial crisis which, as we know, he blamed entirely on George W. Bush. Triggered by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two government sponsored enterprises, the crisis reflected the many “subprime” mortgages they had pressured banks to make. Bush’s efforts to rein them had fallen on deaf ears.

Like Roosevelt, Obama initiated a number of policies and legislation, not the least of which was his “stimulus” package to turn around the economy, but which has left it with a higher level of unemployment today than in 2009-10. His other initiative, stimulating Green energy has cost taxpayers billions.

In “New Deal or Raw Deal?” historian Burton Folsom, Jr., wrote of Roosevelt’s National Industrial Recovery Act (NRA) documenting that it and other measures did nothing more than balloon the federal government while interfering with the normal action of capitalism to recover—as it had many times before—from financial crises.

Oklahoma Senator Thomas Gore, first elected in 1907, summed up Roosevelt’s efforts saying at the time, “No depression can be ended by gifts, gratuities, doles, and alms handed out by the Federal Treasury, and extorted from taxpayers that are bleeding from every pore.”

As Folsom put it, “Capitalism had failed in Roosevelt’s view of the world and that opened the door for new experiments in government ownership and government direction of the economy. Private enterprise would become public enterprise.”

Why anyone would think that Barack Obama, a “red diaper baby”, raised by leftists and mentored in his youth by a card-carrying Communist, Frank Marshall Davis, would act any differently than Roosevelt, repeating all his mistakes, is to be ignorant of history.

The Worst Recovery Ever

Writing in the April 3rd Wall Street Journal, Edward P. Lazear, 2006-2009 chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisors, wrote about “The Worst Economic Recovery in History.” Assessing Obama’s policies, Lazear said that “our current recovery pales in comparison with most other recoveries, including the one following the Great Depression.”

“The Great Depression started with major economic contractions in 1930, ’31, ’32 and ’33. In the three following years, the economy rebounded with growth rates of 11%, 9%, and 13% respectively…According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, the recovery began in the second half of 2009. Since that time, the economy has grown at 2.4%, below our long-term trend by either measure. At this point, the economy is 12% smaller than it would have been had we stayed on trend growth since 2007.”

“It would be difficult to argue,” wrote Lazear, “that government policies over the past three years have enhanced confidence in the U.S. business environment. Threats of higher taxes, the constantly increasing regulatory burden, the failure to pursue an aggressive trade policy that will open U.S. exports and the enormous increase in government spending all are growth impediments.”

Like Roosevelt, Obama has impeded a rebound in the growth of the economy and he has done it by applying all the wrong Socialist “solutions” that extended the Great Depression from 1929 to 1941.

For Obama, this has truly been a crisis that would not be allowed to go to waste. What he has done has been to impose Obamacare in the face of massive rejection, overseen the loss of two million jobs, and increased the national debt to levels that put the U.S. on a crash course to financial collapse.

It would be naïve to think he did not know what he was doing. If one wanted to bring the United States of America to its knees, he would pursue Obama’s policies of the past four years. His “open mike” gaff, speaking with Russia’s President, Dmitry Medvedev, confirms his intent to work closely with America’s longtime adversary if reelected.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Unrepentant Commies

By Alan Caruba

I have known a few Communists in my time. The worst of them are the unrepentant ones, still aglow from the 1960s and 70s when the college campuses and streets were filled with protesters of every description. Others have unhappy memories of the FBI keeping track of them. The best of them had an epiphany at some point in their lives and realized that they truly were, as Lenin called them, “useful idiots.”

I have a tenuous link with one of them, Mark Rudd, because he grew up in the town where I lived most of my life and even attended the high school from which I had graduated ten years earlier. Maplewood, New Jersey had been, in my time, a solidly Republican community, a bedroom town for New York executives who caught the train every morning for the commute.

That began to change imperceptivity as young Democrats began to move in during the Kennedy years and thereafter. In time they gained political control and many of my generation, thanks to ever rising property taxes, began to move to Florida or, in my case, one town over to a new apartment complex.

Once years ago while I was in the bank in Maplewood, I ran into Mark Rudd. We exchanged a few pleasantries, but nothing memorable. By then he was no longer a fugitive from the FBI for having been one of the leaders of the infamous Weather Underground, a group that included Barack Obama’s longtime friend and associate, Bill Ayers and his wife, Bernadine Dorhn.

Though he didn’t directly participate, Rudd knew of a Weather Underground plot to plant bombs at an officer’s club at Fort Dix in 1970 to protest the Vietnam War. When the bombs instead went off in the New York townhouse, killing several of his friends, Rudd concluded that dying senselessly while planning to kill others for a “righteous” cause was not the way he wanted to end up.

Just ask any of the Vietnamese who were lucky enough to escape and to come to America after the fall of Saigon how they feel about his righteous cause. To this day they embrace the veterans who fought there and the nation that took them in and granted them its precious citizenship.

Rudd, however, is an unrepentant communist. His friend, Bill Ayers, has referred to himself as “A communist with a small ‘c’” as if that makes a difference. It doesn’t.

The shooting in Tucson roused Rudd to pen an opinion published in the Jan. 16 Washington Post. It was titled “An ex-Weather Underground radical on the Tucson shootings and political violence.” He recalled that, in 1970 when he was 22 years old, he knew of the plot “and to my eternal shame, I didn’t try to stop it.” Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

“I considered myself an agent of necessity in a political revolution”, wrote Rudd and then added that, even if Jared Loughner was insane, Rudd was sure “he convinced himself that he was doing what needed to be done.”

This is Rudd’s great insight. It is a conclusion that only someone on the farthest reaches of the Left could arrive. It is the conclusion of someone who had decided to devote himself to the nihilistic, atheistic, and totalitarian dogma of the Left.

“As the Weather Underground believed in the absolute necessity of bombs to address actual moral grievances such as the Vietnam War and racism,” wrote Rudd, “Loughner might have believed in the absolute necessity of a Glock to answer his imagined moral grievances.”

For Rudd it was not hard to come up with “moral grievances” when he was in his twenties and his “guerilla hero” was Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, a notorious killer of Fidel Castro’s political opponents. There was nothing heroic about Guevara. He was a psychopath for whom the Cuban communist revolution was just an excuse to indulge his murderous fantasies.

There are somewhere around eighty to ninety million Americans who own guns without coming to the conclusion they have a moral right to use them to kill for any other reason than self-defense.

After the Tucson shooting, the local citizens could not get to the gun stores fast enough to buy guns for their own protection. After Barack Obama was elected, many Americans decided they needed a gun.

Rudd is like many former youthful revolutionary wannabes of the 1970’s with fantasies of changing America to become a new worker’s paradise. These days, decades later, he is married and the father of two children. An article on his website says he is a registered Democrat, but usually votes for the Greens.

After surrendering to the FBI in 1977, he faced only misdemeanor charges. He was fined $2,000 and spent two years on probation. His mother famously asked, “How could you do this to me?”

In 2006-2008, Rudd was a leader of the Movement for a Democratic Society, a network based on his days in the Students for a Democratic Society. Rudd is still a communist along with Ayers, Dohrn, and Jeff Jones, a former Obama “czar” who resigned when people found out.

In 2008, three MDS members, Tom Hayden, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Bill Fletcher, Jr., founded Progressives for Obama, which Rudd endorsed.

The sad part of this is that the Washington Post thought his commentary was worth publishing.

He repeated the calumny against Sarah Palin that she rightly deemed “a blood libel.” Moronically, Rudd concluded that though Loughner was “the product of a different era and may have been motivated only by his madness” his anticipated incarceration will give him “a long time to consider the logic of his alleged actions.”

Insanity defies logic. That’s why it’s called insanity!

Rudd has had over forty years to consider the logic of his commitment to communism and has not arrived at a conclusion that he was ever wrong or that communism is a failed system that exists only through coercion and terror.

He and his friends from the 1970s surely took pleasure in the election of President Obama who was mentored in his youth by Frank Marshall Davis, a card-carrying member of the Communist Party U.S.A.

The spontaneous Tea Party movement devoted to the Constitution and the repeal of Obamacare must be a mystery to Rudd.

As his generation passes from the scene, one can only hope that a new generation of young Americans, passing through a period comparable to the Great Depression do not embrace the communism that many of that earlier era thought was the answer to capitalism.

It wasn’t then. It isn’t now. Liberty, the reason for the American Revolution, is the answer and always will be.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Obama's Communists

By Alan Caruba

“Tailgunner” Joe McCarthy, a 1950s U.S. Senator who lent his name to any effort to expose America’s enemies, was right. At the height of his fame, he said the U.S. government was shot through with communists, many of whom were participating in a vast espionage effort orchestrated by the Soviets.

Though McCarthy was singularly unsuccessful in uncovering communists within the government during Eisenhower’s first term, the “Army-McCarthy” hearings, April 22 to June 17, 1954, were televised for all to see and he became one of the best known anti-communists of his day. Were there Communists and spies for the Soviet Union? Yes, but we would not learn more until a young Senator from California, Richard M. Nixon identified Alger Hiss, a high-ranking State Department official as one.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, the records that became available to historians and other scholars confirmed McCarthy’s worst fears.

During the 1930s and 1940s, communism appealed to many Americans. Some had soured on capitalism because of the Great Depression. Others saw communism at work in the Soviet Union and, believing the propaganda, concluded it was a viable alternative to capitalism. It would take a speech by Soviet Prime Minister Nikita Krushchev to draw back the curtain and reveal the horrors of living under Stalin.

Then, as now, communists found a home in the American labor movement and among the liberal elites of the Democrat Party who saw in the New Deal the way to transform America into a socialist nation, as well as among America’s intellectuals on its college campuses. Not much has changed.

One of the founders of the “Weathermen” group that conducted a number of bombings in the 1960s is now a “distinguished professor” at the University of Illinois—Chicago. Bill Ayers is also a longtime, close friend of Barack Obama.

Sen. McCarthy was quite possibly the worst person of his era to lead the investigation of communist infiltration and Soviet espionage. He was a bombast and a boozer. In August 1954, a Senate committee released a report censuring him for having abused his power as a committee chairman. He would remain in the Senate, but his days of glory were over. His drinking increased and in May 1957 he died from acute hepatitis.

The sad irony of McCarthy’s story is that the government was, indeed, filled with communist sympathizers, known as “fellow travelers”, and with Soviet-run spies. The story can be found in “The Venona Secrets: Exposing Soviet Espionage and America’s Traitors” by Herbert Romerstein and Eric Breindel. “Venona” was the U.S. code word given to secret Soviet spy communications.

Venona revealed the full extent of the spying that was occurring. Venona documented that Harry Hopkins, a close friend and advisor to Franklin D. Roosevelt was also a spy. Both the FDR and Truman administrations were chockablock with communists. The Venona program of interception and analysis ran from February 1943 to 1980.

In the post-war years, the U.S. created the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency to discover and monitor not just the Soviets, but many other enemies of the nation.

A significant example is the way the Soviets were able to build their own atomic bomb long before their own scientists ever could thanks to their espionage program. There were many others who were known in spy craft as “agents of influence”. One of them was I.F. Stone who wrote a widely read newsletter that provided cover for the actual spies and their activities. Stone continues to be hailed in journalism circles as an outstanding investigative reporter.

Among the Soviet spies were the Rosenbergs who were found guilty of passing atomic bomb secrets to the Soviets. The most famous spy of that era was Alger Hiss who at one point served as the director of the Office of Special Political Affairs in the State Department. He would go on to serve as the secretary general of the founding conference of the United Nations and later become president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

The current attacks on the CIA, include a statement by the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, who said “They lie to us all the time.” The Obama Justice Department has re-opened an investigation into interrogation techniques of the CIA as a further effort to discredit the Agency. If you don’t believe this is at the direction of President Obama, you’re being naïve.

In “The Venona Secrets”, the authors note that a classic Stalinist tactic was “demonizing an opponent and then using his vilified name in a broad-brush smear against anyone who challenged Communist views or activities.” This is why the term “McCarthyism” has entered our political vocabulary. This is also what is occurring right now as former Vice President Dick Cheney and former Governor Sarah Palin, get the treatment.

How can you spot a communist sympathizer in the U.S. Congress? You can visit the website of the “Progressive Caucus” where, as of February 2009, more than 80 members of the House, including two from the Senate, self-identify themselves as progressives. “Progressive” was the term communists used after the McCarthy era. It is still in use today.

Some of the progressive caucus members are Ed Markey and Henry Waxman, co-authors of the “Cap-and-Trade bill that would impose a huge tax on all energy use in America. You will find Charles Rangel, currently under ethics investigation for having hidden hundreds of thousands of dollars from authorities. Barney Frank, the “brains” behind Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s purchase of millions in worthless mortgage loans, is a member. He is the godfather of a meltdown on Wall Street that remains a threat to our capitalist economy.

A significant number of the caucus are Afro-Americans. They include Jesse Jackson, Jr., John Conyers, Barbara Lee, Maxine Waters, Donald Payne, and Bobby Rush to name just a few.

With the collapse of the former Soviet Union, many former communists became “environmentalists”, often playing major roles in the many organizations serving that cause.

Among President Obama’s ever-expanding circle of “czars” is Carol Browner, the former Clinton-era director of the Environmental Protection Agency (1993-2000) whose latest appointment also revealed that she served on the Commission for a Sustainable World Society, which is part of Socialist International. Her association with the group has since been scrubbed from their website.

Most obvious and notorious is Van Jones who has never made a secret of his political preference for communism and who is Obama’s new “Green Jobs” czar. The links between the environmental movement and communist goals are numerous, nor should it surprise anyone that the “global warming” hoax was birthed in the bowels of the United Nations.

Today, thanks to the way history is taught in America’s government schools, the threat to freedom that communism posed then and still does pose, is barely a subject for discussion. When he was still an adolescent in Hawaii, President Obama came under the influence of Frank Marshall Davis, a widely known communist in the 1950s.

Obama is completely at home with communists, but is ironically being attacked by the nation’s far Left for not fulfilling their dream of the complete transformation of the nation from capitalism to socialism fast enough.

The destruction of the nation’s economy is necessary to complete the transformation and it is only the outrage and protests of Americans that will save us from a fate that has been and remains the goal of the nation’s communist enemies.