Realities From My Father
September 1, 2012 Leave a comment
OK. Tell me why the President of the United States would decide to weaken the work requirements related to welfare?
The obvious answer: political gain. But there may also be a not-so obvious reason.
A President who thinks that eighteen holes of golf is work enough has now decreed that laboring to obtain an otherwise free benefit is no longer required. Yet, free lunches, there ain’t no such thing. You the taxpayer are paying for someone to sit on their ass and collect welfare.
By presidential fiat just months before the November presidential election Obama has told us in effect that he doesn’t want the beneficiaries of welfare to have to strain themselves on the way to the 7-Eleven. Lifting that bottle of Jack or that can of malt liquor is work enough. Am I being cruel? No. You’ve been to the 7-Eleven and seen the line waiting to buy lottery tickets. Is this a generalization? Perhaps, but you can fill in your own eyewitness accounts. Obama by fiat diminishes individual effort and seeks to replace it with the collective effort (to win reelection.
What may not be so obvious a motive for this fiat by Obama, who is rabidly anti-colonialism (see Obama 2012, the movie), is his desire to denigrate the Protestant work ethic in America. Beyond political gain he may have decreed this because of his or his father’s own ill-will towards American missionaries. One can only speculate based on the familial and national dysfunction found in Obama’s book, Dreams From My Father.
Obama may very well have thought that American missionaries who were sent over many years from U. S. churches to foreign countries like Africa brought with them free-market enterprise, capitalism and the Protestant work ethic along with the Gospel. Because of Obama’s learned hatred of colonialism there would be little wonder when later Obama would sit within ear shot of the black liberation theology rants of “Rev.” Jeremiah (“God Damn America”) Wright. For Obama those “colonizing-looking” missionaries may have appeared to be bringing with them the shackles of Americanism. To Obama and Wright those falsely perceived “projected” purveyors of slavery via work ethic are anathema. And from Obama’s speeches one can readily tell that Obama detests anything American and especially the individual effort which produces human flourishing. Work is just to be a caged sideshow event outside Obama’s big circus tent of government. Obama’s Big Government Show does not need you to work. It just needs your ticket to the show (your vote).
This is the screwed up thinking born out of Obama’s father’s dreams. And, it is now America’s nightmare.
I learned about work from my father. He showed by his example how to support himself and his family. There were times when my dad worked at two jobs. He did what he had to do. He provided for his family and for his future. He also paid taxes and donated ten percent of his earnings to our local church. I’ve followed in my father’s footsteps (see my previous post). Obama on the other hand has no idea about what I talking about here.
Obama’s father spent his time drinking and womanizing. Obama’s “founding fathers” Bill Ayers, Jeremiah Wright and mentor Frank Marshall Davis, a radical poet and former Communist, taught Obama how to radicalize what he felt inside.
Obama has learned nothing from his father except how to hate that mechanism that promotes cultural and material exchange and success via the marketplace. He hates the hard work that supports it. He lives in the valley of the shadow of colonialism.
Beyond this, Obama, in Howard Zinn-Noam Chomsky-like fashion defines America as the pompous ass that needs to bow the knee to the ever-gracious world – the same world that spits out Osama Bin Laden and Khalid Sheik Mohammed, North Korea’s Kim Il-sung, Iran’s Ahmadinejad and countless terrorists and tyrants and those who support them. And like Zinn and Chomsky Obama thinks America has a big head. But what Obama and these other “big heads” don’t realize is that they are projecting their own dysfunctional personalities onto America.
Obama sees nothing exceptional about America. He sees America as the throw-away packaging that holds his own political gain.
Obama: why work so hard trying to reach for the stars when you can easily reach for your food stamps in the voting booth?
*****
What does the 2012 Obama Presidential election campaign look like? A collective of special interest groups (big labor unions, homosexuals, women on birth control who can’t afford to pay the five dollars every month to buy it even though they attend prestigious colleges, etc.), limp-wristed faux Indian progressives like Elizabeth Warren, extremely wack radicals like Van Jones, giant ‘plasticized’ Hollywood egos craving attention, Wall Street deep-pocket Super-Pac cronies, Green Energy Money Launderers, Occupy Whine Street-ers and all the disenfranchised “not-ready-to shovel” for their lunch people.
*****
Jesse Lee Peterson speaks w/ Dr. Dinesh D’Souza, NY Times Bestselling author of “The Roots of Obama’s Rage” and President of The King’s College. D’Souza’s new film, “2016: Obama’s America” – Love Him, Hate Him, You Don’t Know Him!
Let’s Talk Turkey
November 25, 2020 Leave a comment
Let’s Talk Turkey
But first, a word from our sponsors ….
“If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace….We ask not your counsels or your arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen.” ― Samuel Adams
“Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom, socialism restricts it. Democracy attaches all possible value to each man; socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number. Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
“The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.” ― Alexis de Tocqueville
While I was on Twitter, a few years ago, I would jump in on threads where socialism and capitalism were discussed (Better, the terms were tossed about.). The anti-capitalists would denounce capitalism as “unfair” and the rich as “greedy” while insinuating “equality” and “fairness” occurred naturally within the materialist realm of socialism. As an example, they pointed to Scandinavian countries (where, amazingly, none of them had the gumption to take up residence. That would take initiative and responsibility and money on their part.)
The anti-capitalists, assuming a superior moral position, never talked in-depth about the mechanics of socialism other than it being a redistribution of wealth from “rich” to “poor” via confiscatory taxation. And, whether they were oblivious to or welcoming of the growing soft despotism in America that gives people the illusion that they are in control, I could not determine.
On Twitter there were also those who proclaimed Jesus to be a “Progressive”. They offered a litany of “Progressive” attributes assigned to Jesus, among them “anti-rich”, their presumed antithesis to “Blessed are the poor” [“…in spirit”]. There were those, too, who said that the early church was an example of socialism because the early Christian shared everything in common. Apparently, these folks had never read that Jesus warned about the dangers of the love of riches and not that someone who was rich shouldn’t be. Did these folks also not comprehend that the early church did what they did out of love and not out of coercion?
In the current hopped-up milieu of socialism as social justice*, what is the mystique and lure of socialism, central planning, and top-down government when …
-from “Democracy In America” by Alexis De Tocqueville, Chapter VI: “What Sort Of Despotism Democratic Nations Have To Fear”
Long before social media came around fostering populist socialism, I inured myself against the idea of a free lunch. In the 80s I watched Milton and Rose Friedman’s Free to Choose Series on TV. The following video is part of that series.
Plain-spoken Milton Friedman, economist of the Chicago School of Economics, addresses the issue of social responsibility that seems to be the motivation behind a rejection of capitalism and the attraction of socialism. He also presents the fundamental difference between capitalism and socialism: capitalism – an economic market operating under the incentive of profit; socialism – the government market under the incentive of power. Included are his thoughts on collectivism, social justice, moral values, individual responsibility, the doctrine of social responsibility, and philanthropy.
For the many of you around the world who live in disparate circumstances and who read my blog, I pray that you will benefit greatly from this video.
A final word from our sponsors ….
* Pope Francis is Envisaging and Engendering an Open World:
“On the other hand, if we accept the great principle that there are rights born of our inalienable human dignity, we can rise to the challenge of envisaging a new humanity,” he proposes. “We can aspire to a world that provides land, housing and work for all.”
As one can surmise, Francis welcomes the populism of socialism and “for the good of all” envisages a communist version of Catholicism. For example, if you are a Catholic in China, (or the world for that matter) in his vision you’ll be provided land, housing and work provided that you are the Chinese Communist Party’s version of a “good citizen”.
The above helps explain why Pope Francis deplores the populism that elected Trump. A movement of “free people” is hostile to coercive top down rule and to non-democratic central planning and to the liberty-annihilating communism the Pope dreams of and so desires so as to reshape the world into his Let Us Dream image. The Pope/CCP desires the Ring of Power to conform all men to its will.
The Trump movement seeks to take back life, liberty, and country –identity – from the Ruling Class Obama-Clinton-Biden-Cuomo types who talk down to Americans, considering them “bitter clingers” and “deplorables” and rubes. The Trump movement detests the privileged elites (including Francis), and the unelected bureaucrats, and, essentially, those who are “more equal than others” and deign to tell them who they are and what they are to think and what they are to do. The Trump movement fights to keep America from becoming a third world country, as Democrat mayors prove it is possible with their “Open World” policies.
The Trump movement deplores the overreach and suffocating control of globalism. The movement seeks to remove the tentacles of the “Open World” beast that wants to devour the U.S. – our individual rights, our liberty, our Constitution and our identity – to feed its One World Fratelli tutti chimera. “We the people” reject the Great Reset.
The One World forces and the purple and scarlet dressed Whore of Babylon are gathering to fight against the Lord, as foretold.
“The board is set, the pieces are moving. We come to it at last…
The great battle of our time.”
Gandalf, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
Added 11-26-2020:
Podcast:
Totalitarian Democracy Roger Kimball in conversation with Mark Bauerlein
Roger Kimball is Editor and Publisher of The New Criterion
Mark Bauerlein is a professor of English at Emory University.
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Filed under 2020 current events, capitalism, cultural Marxism, Culture, Current Events 2010, Economics, Political Commentary, Politics, Progressivism, social commentary, social justice, socialism, Thanksgiving Tagged with Alexis de Tocqueville, capitalism, Democracy, Economics, Marxism, Milton Friedman, Pope Francis, Samuel Adams, social responsibility, socialism, Thanksgiving. Progressivism