The actual basis for the department’s continued refusal to cooperate with the commission remains unclear. For example, has the president invoked executive privilege over the materials that the commission is seeking? If that is the case, the president or the attorney general must so state. The department’s continued refusal to provide the requested information will lead to a conflict of interest, whereby the target of the subpoena—the department—can evade its statutory obligation to the commission by refusing to respond to or enforce the commission’s subpoena.9
The Democratic Congress, of course, looked the other way while the Holder DOJ refused to respond to every subpoena issued by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, despite the fact that it is required by law to provide information sought in the subpoenas. The responses of the Holder Department of Justice “fall short of even a minimum level of cooperation” according to the commission’s general counsel, David P. Blackwood.10
The country is, effectively, being run by leftist, racist thugs.
I put the president and his Attorney General in that group.
We’re getting a taste of Marxist “justice,” which really amounts to Marxist “revenge” for conditions, among blacks especially, that have largely disappeared over the past fifty years. It’s the revenge of a racial-political group intent on inflicting on white people the same usurpation of freedom they, the whites, inflicted on blacks in the past. This, of course, ignores the fact that over the last half century blacks have achieved equal rights in the United States.
It’s the “justice” of a group out to prove, not only that black people are not capable of running their own lives and so must have Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson and Eric Holder and others of their ilk tell them how to do it. That’s number one. They believe white people should not be given the freedom to make their own decisions either. The American people have been duped into allowing this country to come under the rule of a racist regime, one that will stop at nothing short of inflicting its tyrannical will on us. Voter fraud and intimidation are among the important ways they attempt to advance their illegal agenda.
A look at ACORN’s socialist roots and its ties to other Black Muslim revolutionary groups shows just how intertwined the Obama administration is with this backward-looking movement. It also demonstrates how in tune with its utterly fatuous worldview the people currently charged with governing the United States really are. Leave it to Doc Savage to get to the root of the problem.
The Obama Administration: Where Marxism Meets Radical Islam
While its ostensible purpose was to provide aid and consultation to poor people in inner cities through “community organizing,” in fact, the policies and practices that ACORN supports has done more to enslave America’s inner city poor in the prison of perpetual poverty than any others since the Emancipation Proclamation. American minority populations, if they buy into the lies and disingenuous rhetoric of leftists like ACORN organizers, black power advocates, and Democratic state and federal legislators, are setting themselves up to be as dependent on outside sources for their survival as were their ancestors at the middle of the 19th century. Since then, so relentless has been the left’s agenda against, particularly, American blacks, that the people—including President Obama himself—who support and perpetuate it through the work of agencies like ACORN, should have been exposed long ago.
Their intent and their practices are nothing short of criminal.
ACORN grew out of the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), an organization that came into being in the mid 1960s after the passage of the so-called Great Society legislation as part of the Cloward-Piven strategy to bring down America’s capitalist economy. Its leader was an alienated Chemistry Professor named George Wiley. The group was founded for the purpose of removing restrictions on eligibility requirements for people receiving welfare. It was thought that burdening the welfare system with so many new welfare recipients would bring it to a standstill. This, as the founders’ reasoning went, would force “a radical reconstruction of America’s unjust capitalist economy.”11
The group was highly successful in achieving its goals. Thanks to NWRO, welfare rolls more than doubled in the decade after it initiated its strategy but the results weren’t quite what had been envisioned. The huge increase in the number of people dependent on government for their sustenance fostered dramatic increases in crime, drug abuse, and poverty among inner city poor people. It also created a backlash against welfare mothers, in no small part because of the disintegration of the family in America’s inner cities that it caused.
Among other things, the NWRO’s efforts contributed to a huge spike in births to unwed mothers, to the point where today more than 70 percent of all births to African-American women are born out of marriage.12 It’s managed to effect this consequence—it may well be an intended consequence—through lobbying and demonstrating on behalf of bringing increasing numbers of low-income American women onto welfare rolls.
In fact, it wasn’t until the mid-1990s that welfare reform legislation reversed the trend of increasing numbers of families on welfare and brought so many formerly dependent and unproductive people back into the economic mainstream. From a peak of five million families on welfare in the mid-1900s prior to welfare reform, the number had fallen to only 1.6 million by 2009.13 Today, though, with its return to emphasizing putting more and more people back on the dole as part of its response to the economic downturn, the Obama administration is reversing the trend again through encouraging dependency on welfare, and the number of welfare recipients is again on the rise.
While the NWRO strategy was successful in increasing welfare rolls, it didn’t bankrupt the federal government. When George Wiley realized, in the 1970s, that the NWRO was not going to bring about the anti-capitalist revolution he’d envisioned, he sent Wade Rathke, an NWRO operative, to Little Rock, Arkansas, where he started the Arkansas Community Organization for Reform Now, the first chapter of what would become, after the first word in its name was changed to Association, ACORN.
Over the next thirty years, ACORN pushed a radical leftist agenda using a highly decentralized model. Rather than function as a top-down organization, the group founded relatively independent local organizations that employed its tactics in order to “improve” the lives of its constituents. The tactics favored by ACORN are described by leftist apologists John Atlas and Peter Dreier in their article, “Enraging the Right.” The organization is, as they boastingly point out, “not shy about using … in-your-face tactics,” including, in one instance in Baltimore, “[piling] garbage in front of City Hall to protest lack of services in poor neighborhoods, wield[ing] huge inflated rubber sharks to disrupt a bankers’ dinner and stag[ing] a protest in front of Mayor Martin O’Malley’s home.”
Furthermore, the group is described as “unapologetic about its tactics … because it not only helps draw public attention to neglected issues but also helps build membership.” The results are frequently that “public officials who decry ACORN’s tactics wind up agreeing with its agenda—or at least negotiating with its leaders to forge compromises.” In sum, thanks to ACORN, the progressive tradition is alive and well, with a policy agenda “in the populist and New Deal tradition of saving unfettered capitalism from excessive greed by pushing for tenement housing reforms, workplace safety laws, the minimum wage, aid to mothers and children, Social Security, the right of workers to organize and bargain collectively for better wages and working conditions, subsidies to house the poor, and policies that encourage banks to make mortgage loans to boost homeownership.”14
But if the Obama administration’s Marxist-socialist roots were forged through Obama’s long association with ACORN, his administration is guilty of ties with another, perhaps even more wrongheaded and dangerous element of the left: the Nation of Islam. These ties were initiated in the 1960s through one of the seminal black nationalist groups, the Black Panther Party, and continue today through the current administration’s ties with that group’
s offspring, the New Black Panther Party.
If ACORN has been in the spotlight recently because of O’Keefe’s and Giles’s exposure of its absolute corruption, it is in fact only one of many such leftist organizations intent on keeping American blacks in poverty and despair for the purpose of enabling the takeover of the United States by Marxists. The New Black Panther Party, while its ostensible purpose is to free blacks through revolutionary means, is, like ACORN, perpetuating poverty and suffering among its constituents.
The most comprehensive and unapologetic history of the original Black Panther Party can be found, appropriately enough, at the website Marxists. org in a section about the history of the “workers” movement in the United States. Never mind that Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, founders of the original Black Panther Party in the 1960s, probably never worked a day in their lives but were small-time petty thugs who disguised their criminal intent behind the beard of working to “establish revolutionary socialism through organizing and community based programs.” The website goes on to explain:
from the tenets of Maoism they set the role of their Party as the vanguard of the revolution and worked to establish a united front, while from Marxism they addressed the capitalist economic system, embraced the theory of dialectical materialism, and represented the need for all workers to forcefully take over the means of production.15
After a tumultuous history marked by rampant criminal activities—the group sold copies of Chairman Mao’s infamous Little Red Book, Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong, on college campuses in order to raise money to purchase weapons—internal strife, and conflict with local and federal authorities—J. Edgar Hoover called the Panthers the “greatest threat to the internal security of the country”—the group disbanded in the early 1980s as its leaders were either imprisoned, killed, or sank into disillusionment and drug dependency.
By the early 1990s, though, the New Black Panther Party was formed to carry on the dubious work of its predecessor. The motto of the New Black Panther Party is “Freedom or Death.” The lead stories in the Spring 2010 edition of the group’s newspaper, The New Black Panther, the organization’s self-described “Fastest Growing Black National Newspaper,” paint a picture of the “New Black Panther Party under fire,” particularly from “Congress” and the “Right Wing.”16 New Black Panther Party leader Malik Zulu Shabazz, the author of a feature article on Party founder Dr. Khallid Abdul Muhammad in “The New Black Panther,” describes Muhammad in glowing terms: He stayed “true to core Black Muslim teachings, Nationalist Pan-Africanist Ideology and Revolutionary Doctrine in a time when everybody else was running for cover.” The article features a picture of Muhammad brandishing an automatic rifle.17
Are you starting to get the picture?
It is the “core Black Muslim teachings” that Shabazz refers to that bear closer examination than American journalists have done. First, they’re straight out of the 1960s radical left Muslim playbook. The Nation of Islam combines all the dangerous anti-Christian, anti-western teachings of the religion of Islam with a racist message of hate for the white man. You probably weren’t aware of this, but according to the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, the founder of the Nation of Islam in America:
The entire creation of Allah (God) is of peace, not including the devils who are not the creation of Allah (God) but a race created by an enemy (Yakub) of Allah…. These enemies of Allah (God) are known at the present as the white race or European race.18
Muhammad clarifies, explaining that the white man is “the devil.”
The “Yakub” Muhammad refers to is, according to the Nation of Islam version of the history of humankind, a mad scientist, a man who, more than eight thousand years ago, “embittered of Allah….decided, as revenge, to create upon the earth a devil race, a bleached-out, white race of people.”19 Mr. Yakub did that by systematically genetically engineering a new race of people. In order to further his purpose to enslave the black race, Yakub began to separate out the children.
As the Nation of Islam website explains, “We know that Mr. Yakub set up a rigorous birth control system at the beginning of his civilization, by dividing the brown babies from the black, the brown from the reds, the reds from the yellow. Now bear in mind these are only the major solutions, for there were nine more lighter colors that came after these.”20
It’s on this sort of perverse and distorted belief system that the Nation of Islam—whose followers call themselves Black Muslims—was built, and it’s this belief system, which rests on a hatred of white people that is systematized in the beliefs and preachings of the sect’s founder and in those of the Black Muslim leaders that have followed him. They form the foundation of yet another radical leftist group with direct ties to the Obama administration.
The New Black Panther Party’s connections to the Obama administration are manifest in the special treatment they’re receiving from Attorney General Eric Holder. They’re further manifested in the administration’s pursuit of the political agenda formulated and followed by the Panthers and other Marxist organizations.
The Enslaving Politics of Color
One of the most devastating effects of the activities of groups such as ACORN and the New Black Panther Party is their reduction of a racially identified group of people to the status of pawns in a leftist power play. Minorities, especially inner city blacks, have seen the individuality they had been trying to recover as they emerged from slavery systematically stripped from them as they were grouped together by the Marxist militants, with whom Barack Obama and his administration have close ties, for the purpose of advancing their leftist “causes.”
This type of identity politics is rampant in the Obama administration and among black leaders in general. Although its purpose is ostensibly to promote the interests of blacks and other groups identified by race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation, in fact, the practice of separating out groups of people leads to their interests being subsumed in the greater purpose of the left: to gain power.
The 2008 presidential campaign provides the classic example of how Democrats use identity politics as the basis for almost all their strategic decisions. One of the first things Hillary Clinton brought up when she ended her campaign and endorsed Barack Obama for the presidency was her “gender”:
I was proud to be running as a woman, but I was running because I thought I would be the best president. But I am a woman, and like millions of women I know there are still barriers and biases out there, often unconscious, and I want to build an America that embraces and respects the potential of every last one of us. We must make sure that women and men alike understand the struggles of their grandmothers and their mothers and that women enjoy equal opportunities, equal pay and equal respect.21
But if Hillary Clinton was engaging in identity politics by playing the gender card, Old York Times columnist Bob Herbert who, as a true affirmative action journalist, is always ready to remind us that he’s black, was ready with the race card. After Clinton had conceded the nomination to Obama, Herbert referred in his “celebratory” column to Bobby Kennedy’s picturing, in the late 1960s, America electing a black president within forty years: “The fact that even a dreamer could imagine nothing shorter than a 40-year timeline gives us a glimpse of the nightmarish depths of racial oppression that people of goodwill have had to fight.”
Herbert, like all left-leaning liberals, insists on telling us of the egregious inequities that held at the time Kennedy made his prediction. Instead of celebrating the fact that a woman and a black man were the contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination, he wallows in the statistical inequities of the 1960s: “Fewer than 1% of all federal judges were women, fewer than 4% of all lawyers, and fewer than 7% of doctors.”22 Of course, the kicker is that it wasn’t Democrats or those on the left who really championed equal rights for minorities.
Herbert, as is the tendency of Marxist sympathizers in general, is either ignorant of history or is engaging in the common leftist practice of rewriting it
. Perhaps both are true. While he cites the examples of inequity in the ‘60s, what he fails to point out is that it was Republicans, and not Democrats, who actually enabled, for instance, then-President Lyndon Johnson’s Civil Rights legislation to pass. Republican Senator Everett Dirksen was called on by Johnson to lead the vote in the Senate. As a result, while twenty-one Democrats voted against the Civil Rights Act only six Republicans did so. Republicans did the right thing, and Democrats would have obstructed passage of the Civil Rights Act.
And Herbert conveniently manages to overlook the fact that it was a Republican, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and not a Democrat, who mobilized federal troops in support of the integration of Little Rock, Arkansas’s public schools in 1957, following the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. Without the support of Republicans, the anti-civil-rights Democrats in the Senate would have torpedoed President Johnson’s Great Society legislation, which has unfortunately turned out in retrospect to be a budget-busting entitlement that has essentially created a permanent minority underclass in the United States dependent for its very survival on federal largesse.
If Republicans had not supported the bill, they’d have been branded as racists, even though not supporting it would have been the right thing for them to do. The fact that Democrats voted in large numbers against the legislation is conveniently ignored by commentators like Herbert, even though, as we look back, they were, without knowing it, voting to save blacks from the terrible fate of once again becoming slaves to their white massas. Democrats did the right thing because they were racists; Republicans did the wrong thing because they weren’t. It’s identity politics at its most perverse.
Always ready to pull out the club of identity politics in their search for reasons to denigrate America, leftists insist on mouthing such absurdities as this:
Trickle Up Poverty: Stopping Obama’s Attack on Our Borders, Economy, and Security Page 27
