Let me tell you what Eric Holder is doing in Louisiana to the rights of the very minorities he claims to be defending.
After Hurricane Katrina, the New Orleans school district decided to convert all of the city’s public schools into charter schools. These schools are publicly funded, but independent school boards govern them.
By 2014, 85 percent of New Orleans students attended these charter schools.21
Now the DoJ is aggressively trying to prevent the parents of Louisiana minority school children from being able to choose the school they can attend. He’s doing everything he can to make sure that the children who would most benefit from being able to use the state’s school voucher program are denied.
Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal described it correctly when he said that the president and his attorney general “are trying to keep kids trapped in failing public schools against the wishes of their parents.”
The DoJ is arguing that Louisiana schools that are still operating under desegregation laws passed in the 1970s should not be allowed to issue vouchers to children because the vouchers might upset the racial balance of the schools. In one instance, the Justice Department claimed that a school that had lost six students because they chose to attend other schools had become “too white.” Another had become “too black.”22
Nearly 90 percent of the students in the New Orleans public school system are African-American. The Justice Department is arguing that allowing 570 of them to attend the schools of their choice would “create a racial imbalance.”23
Is Holder saying that 88 percent black students is not racial imbalance?
Or is he really saying that keeping minority students in failing schools will mean that they’re unlikely to be able to go to college and escape being dependent on federal welfare for the rest of their lives?
Of the mountain of questionable moves he’s made, among the attorney general’s most questionable was naming Debo Adegbile to the position of assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department.
Let me tell you who Debo Adegbile is. He’s an attorney who defended cop killer Mumia Abu-Jamal.
On December 9, 1981, a young Philadelphia police officer named Danny Faulkner pulled over a car that was going the wrong way on a one-way street. Quickly, the routine traffic stop turned cold-blooded. Danny, an Army veteran and a newly married husband, was shot once in the back and, as he lay dying, four more times, including once in his face. Mumia Abu-Jamal, a radio personality and Black Muslim, was literally holding the smoking gun when police backup arrived. Abu-Jamal was convicted of murdering Danny Faulkner in Philadelphia in 1982.24
When Holder was trying to push Adegbile’s nomination through the Senate, the Judiciary Committee chairman, Democrat Patrick Leahy, refused to let Faulkner’s widow, Maureen, testify at Adegbile’s confirmation hearing.25 The wife of a murdered cop was denied the right to testify at the appointment hearing of an attorney who had defended the murderer.
Despite Leahy’s intransigence, the Senate, including seven Democrats, staged a victory for principled government, voting by a simple majority of 52–47 to defeat Adegbile’s appointment.26
Harry Reid’s own change of the filibuster rules, which now requires only a simple majority to defeat a filibuster, was forced back down his throat. Without Reid’s unilateral change, the Senate likely would not have had the votes to block Adegbile’s appointment without a filibuster. Reid himself, hoist by his own petard, was furious. Nonetheless, Reid is planning to ask the Senate for another vote on the appointment at some time in the future.27
New York, New York
Let me change the focus from the corrupt politics of the federal government to those of the city I grew up in. What’s happening in New York is mirroring the takeover of our nation, as a committed leftist is trying to seize control of the city.
I grew up in the Bronx. I remember my grandfather well. I call him “the astronaut,” because he was the one who left the old country to come to America, which might as well have been Mars for all he knew. He’s the one who first learned the language that his grandson would later master and make his living from. He’s the one who assimilated and worked so hard that he dropped dead at forty-seven.
I also remember living in a family with a hardworking father and a stay-at-home mother. I remember sitting on my father’s lap as we listened to the radio. There were no satellite dishes, Netflix, or SmartTV. It was simple, hard, and wonderful all at once. Because we knew there was opportunity if we worked for it.
I know New York City. It’s in my blood. I’ve lived through the disastrous administrations of left-of-liberal mayors like John Lindsay and watched from a distance as David Dinkins—even worse than Lindsay, if that’s possible—almost destroyed the city. New York City has many great people. There are even a few good conservatives there. It just has lousy leaders.
And none of them is worse than Bill de Blasio.
Here is how I see Mayor de Blasio: he is following the same socialist path as that being taken by the federal government. This includes expanding benefits for illegal aliens.
This is what de Blasio said in one of his first press conferences as mayor: “To all of my fellow New Yorkers who are undocumented, I say, ‘New York City is your home, too, and we will not force any of our residents to live their lives in the shadows.’ ”
Then why, Mr. Mayor, don’t you send bus tickets to the ones streaming over Arizona’s border carrying bundles of pot? You can meet them at the Port Authority Bus Terminal with a book of food stamps, a Jimmy Buffett T-shirt, and a frozen margarita. The New York City mayor fancies himself a modern-day Robin Hood, taxing the rich to help the poor. But how does he help the poor? By using tax revenues to fund social crutches like pre-K schooling, which will be about as helpful in stopping the cycle of poverty as was Al Gore’s Midnight Basketball. Remember that beauty?
Just two months into his term, de Blasio called a press conference to announce a sweeping plan to crack down on moving violations in order to eliminate pedestrians being killed by motor vehicles. Okay. I don’t think his idea will make much of a difference, but okay. Then, two days after the press conference, a news van following the mayor clocked his SUV going at sixty miles per hour in a twenty-five-mile-an-hour zone while it committed no fewer than thirteen moving violations on a trip from Queens to City Hall. The violations included blowing through stop signs and changing lanes indiscriminately.28
His hypocrisy is inexcusable. The new mayor calls himself a New Yorker, but he grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the shadow of Harvard University. The very definition of a limousine liberal, he eats pizza with a knife and fork and spouts the liberal line about income equality while all the time emboldening social entitlements like food stamps, minimum wage, and illegal-immigrant ID cards that increase inequality.
And where do you think de Blasio came up with these ideas? He calls his policies “government with a soul,” but even his words aren’t his own. Fiorello La Guardia came up with that chestnut when he was mayor back in the 1930s.
I thank my lucky stars every day that I no longer live in New York. I love the city, but I can’t stand its politics.
Take charter schools, for instance. De Blasio is in lockstep with Eric Holder, and he’s using the power of his office to try to enforce regulations that are a blueprint for killing the expansion of charter schools.
In what amounts to a prison sentence, poor and minority schoolchildren in New York City are relegated to a second-class education and permanent status in the American underclass as de Blasio goes about ending a $210 million subsidy for charter schools when they operate in the same buildings as public schools. This would raise costs enormously and make it nearly impossible for these schools to meet operating expenses. De Blasio is doing everything he can to eliminate charter schools by denying them the opportunity to locate in the same buildings as public schools.29
In other words, he’s taking away free choice for the families of s
eventy thousand New York City students who already attend charter schools and fifty thousand more who want to go to them. Like others in positions of power in the Democratic Party, de Blasio is determined to make sure American poor and minority students remain trapped in the American leftist educational gulag.
And the reason is simple: A racial minority citizen who depends on the U.S. government for his or her food and shelter is a guaranteed Democratic voter for life.
Each day this man is in office, he makes the city worse.
Anybody who’s visited Manhattan will tell you that Fifty-Ninth Street between Fifth and Eighth Avenues, also known as Central Park South, is lined with lovely horse-drawn carriages. They’re iconic. They’ve been there forever. You’ve seen them in dozens of movies. One of de Blasio’s first campaign promises was to get rid of them. “[I’ll] aggressively move to make horse carriages no longer a part of the landscape,” he said.
In their place he wants to put electric cars, presumably to run over the pedestrians that he doesn’t hit with his own speeding SUV.
Let me just give you one more example of de Blasio hypocrisy. In February 2013, New York City police pulled over a Lincoln Continental in Brooklyn for making an illegal turn. Orlando Findlayter, the self-ordained “bishop” of a church that’s located over a bodega, was the driver of the car. When police checked, they discovered that the bishop’s driver’s license had been suspended for failure to buy auto insurance, and he was wanted on several outstanding warrants stemming from an immigration protest. Because it was one o’clock in the morning, Bishop Orlando was being processed into the system and was about to spend a night in jail, just like anyone else arrested at that time of night in New York.
Then the phone rang in the precinct commander’s office.
It seems that Orlando Findlayter was more than just a warrant evader and bodega bishop. He was also a member of Bill de Blasio’s transition team and had delivered thousands of black votes for the mayor. When the precinct commander picked up the phone she was quite surprised to hear Mayor de Blasio’s voice.
If you guessed that Orlando didn’t spend the night in jail, you guessed correctly. Because in New York City today there are two sets of rules: one set for the friends of the mayor, and one set for everyone else.30
Since before the days of Abraham Lincoln, New York City has always been the center of media. In Lincoln’s day, of course, newspapers were the main form of professional news delivery. And like the president and the swooning press of today, Lincoln had the editors of the big papers of New York in his watch pocket. In no small measure, those editors and the newspapers they worked for catapulted Lincoln onto the national stage and were perhaps the primary reason he was elected president the first time.
Among the things Lincoln found it necessary to do early in the Civil War was to have the telegraph wires rerouted through the office of his secretary of war, Edwin M. Stanton. Lincoln knew which stories he felt needed to be withheld from publication. Stanton was also in charge of what amounted to Lincoln’s secret police. During the Civil War, this covert squad arrested dozens of reporters and editors who weren’t faithful to Lincoln’s message.31
Obama seems to be following Lincoln’s path, perhaps based on his sense that we’re heading toward a second civil war.
As I told you in chapter 3, the Federal Communications Commission proposed a plan to interrogate television and radio newsroom employees in order to gather information on how they choose the stories they run, although the plan was never implemented. The plan was called Critical Information Needs, and the FCC planned to target newsrooms across the country. Obviously, none of these news organizations would have been able to operate without the FCC’s approval. I ask you: How far away are we from the FCC dictating what the stations can or can’t say?
Here’s how Democrats, along with the FCC—the federal administration group that is looking to steal away even the news we receive in our newspapers and broadcast media—plan to save American citizens in case they have their cell phones stolen: They propose to require by law that phone manufacturers put a “kill switch” in cellular devices so they can be disabled and their personal information wiped out in case their owners lose them. The bill would give the FCC the right to require that this feature be included in new smartphones, and it would likely cost consumers $30 billion… every year.
Pardon my sarcasm, but of course there’s no possibility that the FCC could use this capability to shut down the phones of anyone it thought was engaged in subversive or criminal activity, is there? No chance it might share this capability with, say, the NSA?32
The FCC is only one of the federal agencies this administration uses to attack its enemies.
Filmmaker James O’Keefe had exposed the radical leftist voter-fraud group ACORN by secretly filming ACORN agents explaining to clients how they could game the system. After O’Keefe released the footage to the public, ACORN was effectively disbanded.
That didn’t sit well with the president, who had had close ties to ACORN throughout his political career.
O’Keefe is now having his tax returns audited in New York for the second time.33
While the IRS has singled out O’Keefe and other conservative political individuals and groups for scrutiny, it has intentionally refused to look at the finances of labor unions and business groups who support Obama.
Instead, it’s focusing on the people and organizations that oppose this administration politically.
In November 2013, the IRS changed its regulations regarding 501(c)(4) groups. The new regulations eliminate tax-exempt status for organizations that engage in activities such as educating citizens, holding candidate forums, and political lobbying. The groups targeted include those whose officers have made any public statements that so much as refer to incumbent political figures and candidates.
Labor unions are exempt from these new regulations.
The IRS developed this plan in secret. Lois Lerner, the former head of the IRS’s tax-exempt division and a liberal operative, began to formalize the IRS attack strategy, in conjunction with the Treasury Department, against the administration’s political enemies while Lerner’s own targeting of conservative tax-exempt organizations was at its peak. E-mails between Lerner and Treasury Department officials clearly reveal this.
Treasury Department attorney Ruth Madrigal sent an e-mail to Lois Lerner and other key IRS officials in June of 2012 that referenced “addressing [the political activities of 501(c)(4) organizations] (off-plan) in 2013, I’ve got my radar up and this seemed interesting.”
The targeting of conservative organizations was intentional from the start, and it began as far back as 2011.34
And it was not “rogue” employees, as the president claimed in a national interview, who were carrying out this widespread attack. It was, and continues to be, the collective effort of the administrators who now populate the current administration and threaten our freedoms.
The Four Horsewomen of the Apocalypse
As I’ve told you, the Four Horsewomen of the Apocalypse are the ladies who make most of the decisions that come out of the White House. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who shouted “What difference does it make?” when she was confronted about the four Americans killed in the Benghazi terrorist raid during a Congressional hearing, is one of them.
Two is Susan Rice, who lied to the American people on five national television shows about the Benghazi massacre.
Three was Kathleen Sebelius, now the former Health and Human Services secretary. Sebelius presided over the Obamacare debacle.
And four is Valerie Jarrett, the most powerful and dangerous of them all.
Jarrett’s official title is senior advisor and assistant to the president for public engagement and intergovernmental affairs. Jarrett was the one who advised Obama to go ahead and pass the Affordable Care Act despite the fact that he didn’t have the votes to do so. She’s also the person who advised Obama to loan half a billion dollars to Solyndra, th
e failed green energy company that cemented the administration’s reputation for crony capitalism and unworkable projects.35
But despite her disastrous record as a decision maker, Jarrett is the key advisor to the president.
When the American consulate in Benghazi was under siege, it was Jarrett who is said to have ordered the stand-down.36 She’s also reported to be the one who was instrumental in negotiating the infamous deal with Iran that has allowed that country to continue developing nuclear weapons.
Though Jarrett may be the most dangerous person in Washington, D.C., John Podesta is one of the most destructive leftists I know. Podesta was allegedly brought on to help right the foundering administration by rescuing it from the Obamacare disaster and the scandals I’ve just gone over.
Podesta, a former Bill Clinton advisor, is the founder of the Center for American Progress. This group was formed to promote the ideas of the left, and it functions thanks to donations from subversives like George Soros. Podesta’s Center for American Progress is a tax-exempt corporation that I’m sure will never face problems with the IRS.
Podesta, a card-carrying leftist, has dedicated his life to developing policies and programs in the United States and internationally that undermine capitalism and freedom. In addition to working on the PR job of rebranding and selling Obamacare to an unwitting public, Podesta is taking his show global by working with the United Nations on something called the “universal sustainable development agenda,” which is gobbledygook for “food stamps for the world.” The plan is slated to begin in the year 2020.37
Podesta is also focused on stopping global warming for the world. As I’ll explain to you in the next chapter, beneath its bogus “science of climate change,” the climate change movement is actually an international leftist attempt at a worldwide wealth transfer, not from the rich to the poor but from the middle-class taxpayers around the globe to the über-wealthy.
This is not a book devoted just to bashing our president. Our freedoms are being undermined by anti-American forces that include many in the U.S. government, in our education system, our press, and our military. From economic advisors to foreign enemies, we’re fighting against a broad-based coalition that wants to see us fail. Nonetheless, I’d be remiss if I didn’t bring what the president is doing out into the open.
Stop the Coming Civil War: My Savage Truth Page 15
