Obama and Marx’s Ten-Point Platform

Posted By Mark Hendrickson On July 31, 2013 @ 12:55 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 22 Comments

It can be startling to realize how much of Karl Marx’s ten-point platform to socialize an economy (set forth in Chapter Two of “The Communist Manifesto”) has been implemented in the United States. I even wrote a book about it in 1987.[1] Never before Barack Obama’s presidency, however, has a president pushed so assiduously to advance all ten points in Marx’s plan. Is it just a coincidence that Obama’s mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, was a card-carrying Communist and that Obama gravitated toward radicals such as alleged Cuban agent of influence Bill Ayers? Or, as the following synopsis shows, is Obama’s economic agenda is actually Marxist?

This cursory examination of Obama’s Marxian policies will be presented in two parts. The first part below will cover Marx’s first five points, and Part Two will review the second five points. The two planks in Marx’s platform that pose the greatest threat today are Numbers Five and Ten, so I will cover those in greater detail.

Here is a brief summary, with Marx’s wording being edited for simplicity’s sake:

#1. State control of territory.

On repeated occasions, Team Obama often has thwarted the development of domestic energy supplies through arbitrary regulatory control over massive tracts of federally owned land and restricting drilling in American waters off our coasts.

#2. Progressive income taxes.

Obama has an Ahab-like obsession with further raising taxes on “the rich” even though the top 1% of earners already pays almost as much of the federal income tax as the bottom 95% of taxpayers combined.[2]

#3. Abolition of inheritance.

Obama has succeeded in reinstating federal inheritance taxes and recently proposed raising them further by reducing the dollar threshold at which the tax kicks in and no longer allowing that amount to be indexed to inflation.[3]

#4. Confiscation of the property of emigrants and rebels.

The US has long been one of the few countries to tax its citizens on income earned abroad (a tax that applies to incomes above $95,100). In 2010, Obama won passage of the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, which orders foreign financial institutions to provide information to the IRS about Americans’ offshore holdings.

#5. Centralization of the country’s financial system in the hands of the state.

Certainly this trend was well established before Barack Obama became president. Thanks to decades of deficit spending, enabled by an accommodating central bank willing to help underwrite the federal government’s chronic over-spending, Big Government and Big Finance have become joined at the hip. This was dramatically demonstrated in 2008 when George W. Bush gave his blessing to a federal bailout of Wall Street. By that time, the heavily indebted federal government had grown far beyond Main Street banks’ ability to finance its massive fiscal operations. Only the colossal financial infrastructure of the megabanks and other gigantic financial institutions was sufficient to maintain an orderly market for the federal Treasury’s seas of red ink, and so federal intervention to rescue Wall Street was an inevitable act of self-preservation on the part of Uncle Sam.

Yet, even though in some ways Obama is merely continuing in the direction charted by his predecessors, he has found a way to accelerate the centralization of credit in the hands of the state. I am referring to the 2010 Dodd-Frank bill—both its content, which Obama supported, as well as the aggressive ways in which he is having it implemented.

Dodd-Frank established the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and designed it in such a way that its director would be completely unaccountable to congressional or judicial review while giving the director the power to set its own budget. It is difficult to imagine a less democratic, more autocratic power than that wielded by the director of the CFPB. The word “czar” has been used to describe certain presidential appointees, but the CFPB director has such broad powers and is so insulated from checks and balances that the description “czar” seems to be literally true.

While the stated purpose of Dodd-Frank was to reduce dangerous degrees of financial leverage, the larger import of the bill is the way it increases the government’s political leverage over a wide range of financial firms. President Obama, Sen. Dodd, and other supporters of the bill assured us that this law would protect Americans from the financial fallout of major bankruptcies by authorizing federal regulators to shut down financial institutions “in an orderly fashion” when they start to fail, or to bail them out. [Although Obama himself insisted that Dodd-Frank didn’t contain bailout provisions, two members of the president’s own party did. Sen. Ted Kaufman (D-Del.) stated that the bill expands “the safety net … to cover ever-larger and more complex institutions heavily engaged in speculative activities,” thereby “sowing the seeds for an even bigger crisis.” Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.) categorically declared, “The bill contains permanent bailout authority.”][4]

Such life and death power, of course, gives the CFPB tremendous leverage over financial institutions. It doesn’t require a lot of imagination to anticipate how such immense power could be used as leverage (what in the private sector might be called “extortion”): “Listen, Ms. CEO, the guys at Treasury think you should do A, B, and C. You’re free to do what you want, but if you don’t do what they suggest, we at the CFPB may pull the plug on you. On the other hand, make them happy and they’ll name you ‘systemically important.’” The Dodd-Frank law has the potential to make vassals and serfs out of all financial institutions, which is exactly what Karl Marx wanted.

Lest you think Barack Obama wouldn’t use the powers of the CFPB to promote his own agenda, he couldn’t even wait until the director of CFPB, Richard Cordray, was duly confirmed (which the Senate finally did earlier this month) before the abuses started. As reported by Paul Sperry in Investor’s Business Daily on July 3, the Obama administration already was using the CFPB to “compil(e) a massive database of personal information” about “your bill-paying and spending habits.”[5] In the context of a presidential administration that already has given ominous indications of being of the Big Brother type (e.g., NSA and IRS data collection) it seems that the Obama administration is moving in the direction not only of total financial control over financial institutions, but over all of us as individuals, too.

[To be continued in Part Two]

Notes:

[1] Mark W. Hendrickson, America’s March Toward Communism, Libertarian Press, 1987.

[2] Mark J. Perry, “The top 1% of US taxpayers pay almost as much in federal income taxes as the entire bottom 95%, and half of that bottom group paid no taxes at all in 2010,” Carpe Diem blog, December 27, 2-12, 11:37 am;
http://www.aei-ideas.org/2012/12/top-1-of-american-taxpayers-pay-almost-as-much-in-taxes-as-bottom-95-and-half-of-that-group-paid-nothing-in-2010/

[3] http://www.investmentnews.com/article/20130411/FREE/130419987#

[4] Mark W. Hendrickson, “Sen. Dodd’s Financial Reform Bill: The Problem of Leverage,” posted on Visionandvalues.org, April 28, 2010; www.visionandvalues.org/2010/04/sen_dodd_s_financial_reform_bill/

[5] Paul Sperry, “bama Credit Watchdog Snoops Personal Financial Data,” IBD Editorials, posted on investors.com, 07/03/2013 6:59 PM ET.

Obama and Marx’s Ten-Point Platform (Part II)

Posted By Mark Hendrickson On August 1, 2013 @ 12:45 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 4 Comments

Having gone over, in Part One, how far President Obama has gone to implement the first five of Marx’s ten points for how to convert a society to socialism, let’s pick up the narrative by reviewing the other five points.

#6. State control of means of communication and transportation.

Team Obama has attempted to cow conservative media outlets like Fox News into submission through denunciation, has suggested reviving the so-called “fairness doctrine,” and has expressed hostility toward free speech, seeking to use regulations to shape and limit the public. In the area of transportation, Obama insinuated government into the auto industry, has favored the high-speed rail boondoggle, and wishes he could compel us all to convert to “green transportation,” such as electric cars and biofuels.

#7. Increase state control over means of production.

Besides increasing government control of financial institutions (including having virtually nationalized the mortgage industry by taking over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) Obama has moved to centralize control of health care and insurance; has dictated policies, and even hand-picked a CEO, of American automobile companies; and has done his best to increase government power over the energy industry through his green energy subsidies, his failed cap-and-trade scheme, and via EPA regulation.

#8 Establishment of workers’ armies.

Obama has ramped up the number of Americans working for Uncle Sam by securing a large expansion of Americorps and winning passage of his Serve America Act. He also has done everything he could to strengthen labor unions.

#9. Control over where people live.

Under Obama, The Department of Housing and Urban Development has launched a plan to change where some people live to achieve an indefinite goal of a more even racial distribution of the population.[1]

One of the implications of cap & trade or other attempts by Obama to regulate how much carbon dioxide Americans emit via fossil fuel consumption is the prospect of government limiting human mobility by raising the cost (even to the extent of imposing financial penalties) for exceeding government-determined limits on how far a person may travel.

In Brian Sussman’s book, Eco-Tyranny, you can read an executive order that Obama signed on October 5, 2009 that would “divide the country into sectors where all humans would be herded into urban hubs” while most of the land would be “returned to a natural state upon which humans would only be allowed to tread lightly.” (Marx wanted more equal distribution of the human population between town and country, whereas Obama favors urban concentration, but both want to control where people live.)

#10. Education for all children in public (i.e, governmentally controlled) schools.

Marx’s tenth point is the most far-reaching and potentially dangerous of all. It’s target—control over how and what people think—is the ultimate tyranny. That is why every communist state uses schools as institutions of indoctrination, just as they use media outlets as instruments of propaganda. That is why George Orwell featured “Newspeak”—the mutilation of truth and reason by distorting the meanings of concepts. Every illiberal regime seeks to impose mental programming that produces “the new Soviet man.”

Obama has done more than any previous president to centralize control over education in Washington. He has essentially nationalized the student loan market.[2] He has repeatedly tried to limit school choice, instead siding with would-be teachers’ union monopolists.

In his 2012 State of the Union address, which I attended, he called for additional funds for new federal education programs, including mandatory nationwide schooling for everyone up to age eighteen, regardless of aptitude, interest, or willingness.

Obama has sought to extend the tentacles of federal control over how state education policies by arbitrarily granting waivers exempting some states from George W. Bush’s misguided No Child Left Behind Act. In doing so, Obama has trampled on the principle of federalism and most assuredly granted waivers with strings attached, thereby reducing states’ independence.

Most recently, Team Obama has been pushing the Common Core State Standards—a follow-up to his “Race to the Top” program that spent over $4 billion to induce states to switch to federal standards for curricular guidelines. While Race to the Top and Common Core may sound innocuous or even reasonable, the actual effects are deleterious. Both programs essentially bribe states to replace their existing standards with federal standards, even though, as California has found out, states have had to “dumb down” their standards to conform to federal standards that are lower. [3]

More ominously, the Obama administration is using the Common Core program to invade privacy (think NSA, IRS, and the CFPB — see Part One of this article). In 2011, the Department of Education unilaterally, without congressional approval, altered the regulations based on the Federal Education Rights and Privacy Act of 1974—loosening them so that mounds of personal data about students may be collected. The personal data include not just academic records, such as grades and whether students complete homework assignments, but also disciplinary records, Social Security numbers, records of discussions with school counselors, as well as information about families’ voting status, religious affiliations, medical history, and income.

As the obnoxious cable TV commercials say, “But wait, there’s more!” If that isn’t invasive enough, the intrepid Michelle Malkin has reported that Team Obama’s Department of Education is preparing to use the most advanced technologies (e.g., cameras to judge facial expressions, electronic seats that report posture, a pressure-sensitive computer mouse, biometric wraps on wrists, etc.) to assess a wide variety of student attitudes—“appreciation for diversity,” “empathy,” “bias,” “cultural awareness,” etc.[4]

You can imagine the mischief to which such data-mining could be put—a “brave new world” in which the government uses the data collected in schools to single out “right thinkers” for the fast track to the best schools and key government positions, and putting dissidents from the desired orthodoxy on black lists. You can see the totalitarian potential of such data mining performed under the pretext of “education.” Surely Comrade Marx would commend Barack Obama for his diligent efforts in the field of education.

The bottom line in all of this is that if Barack Obama is not an economic Marxist at heart, he is doing a superb imitation of one. The fact that he enjoys such unflagging support for his agenda from a significant part of the population shows just how far our country has gone in forsaking our founding principles for the siren song of socialism.

Notes:

[1] “HUD Launches Scheme To Racially Diversify Suburbs,” IBD Editorials, posted 07/22/2013 06:55 PM ET.

[2] Andrew Clark, “”Obama’s Risky Plan: Government Takeover of the Student Loan Business,” Politics Daily, January 26, 2010; www.politicsdaily.com/2010/01/26/obamas-risky-plan-takeover-of-the-student-loan-busi/

[3] Mytheos Holt, “New Whiteboard Video Attacks ‘Obama’s Education Takeover,’” theblaze, Feb. 17, 2012; www.theblaze.com/stories/2012/02/17/new-whiteboard-video-attacks-obamas-education-takeover/

[4] Michelle Malkin, “Time To Opt Out of Creepy Fed Ed Data-Mining Racket,” Accuracy In Media guest column, posted March 18, 2013 @ 2:50 am; http://www.aim.org/guest-column/time-to-opt-out-of-creepy-fed-ed-data-mining-racket/

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