01/28/15

We asked an expert: ‘What exactly is an EMP, and how much damage could it do?’ His response was terrifying.

By: Benjamin Weingarten
TheBlaze

In light of nuclear negotiations with Iran, the general conflagration in the Middle East, Russia’s march and a whole host of other chaotic situations worldwide, recently we sat down with an expert on national security, foreign policy and in particular nuclear proliferation, John Wohlstetter, to discuss the gravest threats to the American homeland.

Wohlstetter, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute and London Center for Policy Research, two conservative think tanks, recently released an updated edition of his book on this very topic, “Sleepwalking With the Bomb,” and delivered a speech earlier in January titled “Rethinking the Unthinkable Why Failures of Imagination, Projection, and Strategy Court Nuclear Catastrophe” that piqued our interest.

During our interview with Wohlstetter, we had the chance to ask a very basic set of questions about what is potentially the most devastating of all weapons that could be launched at the market homeland: Electromagnetic pulse (EMP). Wohlstetter’s five minute primer, which you can find below, covers (i) What exactly an EMP is, (ii) How much damage it could cause in a worst case scenario and (iii) How an EMP attack might transpire:

What would the doomsday scenario of an EMP attack against an America whose infrastructure is not currently protected look like?

In a worst case scenario the detonation would be over Dorothy’s Kansas, in the center of the country. And at 300 miles altitude, you would have a circle, 360 degrees, with a radius of 1,470 miles…that covers the continental United States lower 48 states.

And in a worst case, you could see within a year 90% of the population die, as you don’t have electric power, nothing works, you can’t even get food to market. It would be catastrophic beyond belief.

And if you do it over the Eastern seaboard, you could center an explosion at a lower altitude, say 20-30 miles up over Pennsylvania. And you would cover about, if you centered it there…375 miles…And what you would do with that is take down the Eastern interconnection which supplies 70% of the country’s electric power.

Given that our infrastructure is not protected against this attack today — an infrastructure that Wohlstetter argues could be hardened for a figure of around $10 billion — are there at least contingency plans in place?

If the Congressional panel that looked at it was correct, in a worst case…you could see 90 percent or 100 percent of the network taken out. And if that happens, you can’t recover. It’s not like out of a disaster like a hurricane where you have edge recovery — communities that bring in supplies, rebuild for you, house people who have been displaced as happened after Katrina for example. You don’t have that edge recovery. In the case of the network, there are some transformers in big systems that take several years when you order them to bring them in and put them online. And…at least on what is know publicly, we do not have an adequate supply [of them]. [Link ours]

During the interview, which you can find below, we also had the chance to discuss several other critical topics including:

  • The biggest threat to American national security today
  • Why the nature of the threat of a nuclear weapon is far more worrying today than during the Cold War
  • The knock-on effects of a nuclear Iran
  • The strength (or lack thereof) of America’s missile defense system
  • How an EMP could be launched above the U.S.
  • Why the concept of mirror imaging is essential to understanding America’s foreign policy failures
  • And much more

Rethinking the Unthinkable Why Failures of Imagination Projection and Strategy Court Nuclear Catastrophe by…

 

Note: The link to the book in this post will give you an option to elect to donate a percentage of the proceeds from the sale to a charity of your choice. Mercury One, the charity founded by TheBlaze’s Glenn Beck, is one of the options. Donations to Mercury One go towards efforts such as disaster relief, support for education, support for Israel and support for veterans and our military. You can read more about Amazon Smile and Mercury One here.

01/28/15

Violence from the North

Arlene from Israel

Yesterday, four rockets were launched from a Syrian-held position roughly seven kilometers inside of Syria; two of the rockets landed in the Israeli Golan Heights.  They landed in open areas and there were no casualties.  Military sources identified this as a joint effort of Hezbollah and Syrian forces; the IDF said that Syria would be held responsible for whatever happened inside of its territory.  Within hours, Israel responded with an artillery attack that yielded a direct hit on the source of the rockets.

~~~~~~~~~~

That was yesterday.  Today was much worse. This time the attack was from Lebanon, not Syria, and it claimed casualties.  Some five or six Kornet anti-tank missiles were launched in an ambush attack against military vehicles traveling on a road about two kilometers inside of Israel, in the village of Ghajar.  The launching site is estimated to have been four or five kilometers from the IDF vehicles.

A burnt vehicle is seen near the village of Ghajar on Israel's border with Lebanon
Credit: Reuters

Two IDF soldiers were killed: Staff Sergeant Dor Nini, 20, and Major Yochai Kalangel, 25 (on the left below).

Israeli Soldiers

Credit: YNet

Reports are not consistent, but some additional seven soldiers were injured.

At the same time, there were mortar shells aimed at IDF bases in the area.

Israel responded with return fire into Lebanon, and declared the Lebanese responsible for what happens on their soil.  As was to be expected, the Lebanese are furious with Hezbollah for operating against Israel from their territory.

Hezbollah declared the attack to be retribution for the death of the “martyrs” in the convoy that Israel had hit.

~~~~~~~~~~

At this point in time, additional information is scarce.  I post now simply to get the word out (not sure how widely this will be covered); more will follow in a day or two.

~~~~~~~~~~

I cannot sign off, however, without noting that yesterday marked the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the death camp of Auschwitz.  Survivors – fewer in number every year -assembled there for a major ceremony.

Credit: Daily Mail

The message is that we dare not forget.  And that message carries enormous urgency today, as anti-Semitism in all its virulence is on the rise.

The difference for Jews now as versus 70 years ago is the existence of the State of Israel.  Our leaders here have a solemn obligation to defend Israel with great strength and determination.  Whether the world likes this or not is irrelevant.

01/28/15

Lynch Doubles-Down On Executive Work Permits For Illegal Workers

In addition to suspending enforcement for nearly all of the 12 million individuals unlawfully present in the United States, President Obama issued an executive decree on November 20th, 2014, extending work permits, Social Security, Medicare, tax credits, and government identification to 5 million illegal immigrants and illegal visa violators. This would allow illegal immigrants to take any job in America, regardless of chronic high unemployment for Americans—including a 10.4 percent unemployment rate for African-American workers. Peter Kirsanow, a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, explained—contra AG Holder’s “breathtaking” contention that amnesty was a civil right—that unlawful amnesty for illegal immigrants violated the rights of U.S. citizens to the full protection of their laws, including those laws passed by Congress to protect their jobs and wages from illegal competition. The President’s executive edict (an edict he said previously only an Emperor would deign to issue) voids Americans’ legal protections in law, supplanting them with a new executive policy that Congress and voters have rejected, a policy which forces unemployed Americans to compete against a large and growing illegal workforce.

———————

Earlier today, Lynch declared during an in-depth exchange that people who entered the country unlawfully have a “right” to work and that they should work. Later, she declared that the President’s decision to bypass Congress in order to grant work permits to illegal immigrants was “legal and constitutional.” These amnestied workers will now be able to take any job in America, despite 1 in 4 men and women aged 25-54 not currently being employed.

01/28/15

Chris Christie named in two lawsuits alleging violations by Family Courts

By: Michael Volpe
Rebel Pundit

Chris Christie

Chris Christie has been named as a defendant in two cases that are part of series of lawsuits across the country where serious concerns about violations of citizens’ rights in family courts are under scrutiny.

CALIFORNIA

An upcoming civil RICO lawsuit to be filed on behalf of the watchdog group Family Court Accountability Coalition (FCAC) will allege that a feeder system created by the Sacramento County Bar Association Family Law Division, in conjunction with several powerful judges, creates a racket which chooses favored divorce lawyers and makes sure those lawyers get favorable rulings in Sacramento County family court rooms.

In 1991, Judges Vance Raye and Peter McBrien, formed the Family Law Executive Committee (FLEC) to help deal with family law cases in Sacramento County family courts. This FLEC would be a group of lawyers, according to the upcoming suit, chosen by the Sacramento County Bar Association’s family law division which would act as judge pro temp on certain family law cases and in exchange, the suit will allege, the lawyers chosen for this task would be given favorable rulings, deserved or not, when they appeared in divorce court in their regular roles.

Read more…

01/28/15

An Auschwitz Anniversary

By: Alan Caruba
Warning Signs

Auschwitz

There was some serious irony when U.S. Secretary of Treasury Jack Lew gathered together with French President Francois Hollande and a Russian delegation led by Sergei Ivanov, Putin’s chief of staff, along with leaders from Germany and Austria to participate in the January 27 ceremony commemorating the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945 by Russian troops.

I suspect that an entire generation or two born after that year, 70 years ago, may have little or no knowledge of what Auschwitz was. It was a Nazi death camp located in Oswiecim, Poland. Its full name was Auschwitz-Birkenau and it is estimated that one million people, mostly Jews, were killed there.

I say “irony” because Auschwitz-Birkenau was part of a system of six Nazi death camps that included Belzac, Chelmo, Majdanek, Sobibor and Treblinka. Each camp was filled with the victims of a widespread anti-Semitism that had existed in Europe for two thousand years, so it was not difficult for the Germans to turn a blind eye or the French and others to provide assistance in rounding up their Jews.

Jewish StarThe camps engaged in large scale murder to fulfill Adolf Hitler’s intention to exterminate every Jew in Europe. In 1933 there had been nine million living in 21 nations that would be occupied during World War II. By 1945, two out of every three European Jews had been killed.

In addition to the Jews, an estimated five million others deemed enemies of the state for political or other reasons such as being Communists, trade unionists, gypsies or homosexuals also died in the camps.

What is rarely acknowledged is that the Europeans of that era were largely educated, had a rich culture of music, literature, and drama, and many were church-goers. In short, you would not have been able to tell them apart from the Europeans of today.

The Nazis wrote the book on the use of terrorism to facilitate their barbaric, murderous theology of death. The Muslims that have moved to Europe have adapted it to their own ends, seeking like the Nazis to become globally dominant. They don’t have death camps—yet—but the widespread and constant slaughter in which they are engaged has a similar feel to it.

In the 1930s those European Jews had few places to which to flee. They were not even that welcome in America where anti-Semitism was widespread. Those that could did emigrate and, again there is irony because several of the German physicists that came to the U.S. were instrumental in the creation of the atomic bomb that ended World War II while others played roles in the Nazi’s defeat during the war. One such emigrant, Albert Einstein, was the first to suggest the creation of the weapon to Franklin Roosevelt.

In response to European anti-Semitism, a movement called Zionism had begun before World War II with the intention of reestablishing Israel as a Jewish state where Jews could be safe. The movement was founded by Theodor Herzl in 1896. Here again there is irony because the movement was dominated by secular Jews who were not motivated by Jewish history or the Torah. What they wanted was to be free of the oppressive antipathy of the nations in which they lived. What they were seeking was emancipation.

By the time World War II occurred they were a force to be recognized in Israel, known at the time as the Palestinian Mandate and run by the British who, as often as not, shared the anti-Semitism that had given life to the Zionist movement. It would take the Holocaust to accelerate the movement of Europe’s surviving Jews to Israel which in 1948 declared its sovereignty and was immediately attacked by the Muslim nations surrounding it.

Fast forward to our times and the Jews of Israel as well as those around the world know one truth. If Iran is permitted to reach a point where it can create its own nuclear weapons and put them on their missiles, Israel will only be minutes away from an extermination that the Iranian leadership and the other Muslim nations of the Middle East have openly called for since Israel came into being and the Islamic Revolution took control of Iran in 1979.

This time, however, the same nuclear weapons that would destroy Israel would also be turned on the United States because the shouts of “Death to America. Death to Israel” are a part of the daily lives of the Iranians, as well as others in the region.

What makes these days so dangerous is that the United States of America is engaged in negotiations with an Iran that has never made a secret of their intention to be a nuclear-armed nation. What makes these days so dangerous is that the President of the United States has barely hidden his own anti-Semitism and animus toward Israel.

One can only pray that seventy years hence some other writer will not be commenting on the second great annihilation of the Jews, literally within the lifetime of people who were alive during the first one. I am one of those people and Auschwitz is not some place that existed a long time ago. It was yesterday.

© Alan Caruba, 2015

01/28/15

Watcher’s Council Nominations – Snowed In Edition

The Watcher’s Council

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-rqm3xursN8A/VMZUg-wsb3I/AAAAAAABqDc/beJ75C6IVPY/s1600/Boston%2Bsnow.jpg

Welcome to the Watcher’s Council, a blogging group consisting of some of the most incisive blogs in the ‘sphere and the longest running group of its kind in existence. Every week, the members nominate two posts each, one written by themselves and one written by someone from outside the group for consideration by the whole Council. Then we vote on the best two posts, with the results appearing on Friday morning.

Council News:

The Council In Action!

*Terresa Monroe-Hamilton of The Noisy Room was quoted quoted from coast to coast on Christian radio for a post at Right Wing News: For God and country’ recruiting poster was ordered removed by the US Army; ‘God’ is a problem in Obama’s military

*This week, Trevor Loudon, Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion, The Political Commentator and The Pirate’s Cove earned honorable mention status with some great articles.

You can, too! Want to see your work appear on the Watcher’s Council homepage in our weekly contest listing? Didn’t get nominated by a Council member? No worries.

To bring something to my attention, simply head over to Joshuapundit and post the title and a link to the piece you want considered along with an email address (mandatory, but of course it won’t be published) in the comments section no later than Monday 6 PM PST in order to be considered for our honorable mention category. Then return the favor by creating a post on your site linking to the Watcher’s Council contest for the week when it comes out on Wednesday morning.

Simple, no?

It’s a great way of exposing your best work to Watcher’s Council readers and Council members while grabbing the increased traffic and notoriety. And how good is that, eh?

So, let’s see what we have for you this week…

Council Submissions

Honorable Mentions

Non-Council Submissions

Enjoy! And don’t forget to like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter… ’cause we’re cool like that! And don’t forget to tune in Friday for the results!

01/28/15

Obama’s Economic Shell Game

By: Bethany Stotts
Accuracy in Media

Whether in his State of the Union or his recent campaign-like visits to the states, the President has been touting an economic recovery that his policies have supposedly fostered after he inherited a dire recession from George W. Bush. This narrative, repeated over and over through the years, is filled with half truths and exaggerations. Yet a complicit media is more than willing to look the other way from Americans suffering at the hands of a weak recovery with any numbers it can get its hands on.

To add insult to injury, the President’s proposed $320 billion in new tax increases makes it obvious that he’s “not serious about governing,” according to a Washington Post opinion piece by former Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen. But, he argues, this political ploy will only work if the right is distracted by it.

Similarly, John Podhoretz writes for the New York Post that Obama gleefully “trolls,” or enrages his political opponents, to elicit ad hominem, spittle-filled disgust regardless of policy merits and the Democratic Party’s health. So when Americans hear the President proposing new taxes and claiming the country boasts a healthy, recovering economy, they may assume he’s tone deaf. However, he’s deliberately “trolling” for political effect.

The President is also fond of touting that the federal deficit has fallen from 10 percent of GDP to three percent of GDP, but such a claim couldn’t even fool Politifact, which rated the assertion as “half true.” “Obama is laying the blame for the high deficit-to-GDP ratio entirely on Bush, when the figure covers time in office for both presidents,” they say. “The statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details, so we rate it Half True.”

From where I come from a “half truth” is really a lie. Add to the list of false assertions the evergreen claims by President Obama that a) he has made the best of a terrible recession, and b) that our economy is now going strong because the unemployment rate is now below six percent.

“The widely publicized unemployment rate, eagerly awaited each month by pundits and policy wonks, has become little more than a shell game in which officials keep the public guessing about the real state of the economy,” pointedly wrote Jay Schalin of the John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy back in 2012.

Reporting by The New York Times exposed that where once someone would have qualified as officially unemployed, they may now remain uncounted as “out of the labor force.” “In particular, there seems to have been an increase in the number of people who once would have qualified as officially unemployed and today are considered out of the labor force, neither working nor looking for work,” reported David Leonhardt last August.

Yet the Times, after the State of the Union last week, congratulated the President for his efforts to “cement an economic legacy that seemed improbable early in his first term, when the country was in near-economic collapse.” What then, is the President’s economic legacy of recovery to date?

Millions of people are not being counted in the most recent official unemployment rate of 5.6 percent. Schalin pointed his readers to a more accurate barometer—the labor participation rate. It currently sits at a 36-year low.

The falling labor participation rate, reports Jeffrey Scott Shapiro for The Washington Times, “translates to more than 7 million fewer workers in the workforce.”

The Wall Street Journal reports that a “U.S. economy that suddenly looks healthy” isn’t “luring back many of the millions who dropped out of the labor market during the down times.”

The outlook for America’s jobless and uncounted is dismal. “Over the past three months, an average of 6.8% of those outside the labor force either found a job or began looking for one,” reports The Wall Street Journal. “That means people are entering the labor force at the lowest pace in records kept since 1990, down from more than 8% in 2010.”

But the media instead carefully misinform the public to boost presidential credibility. The Washington Post, after the State of the Union address, called our President “cautious over the past two years not to gloat over news of fitful economic growth, mindful that the economy remained tenuous and public confidence uneasy.” Now, however, “with the jobless rate well below 6 percent, the stock market nearing record highs and his job-approval ratings rebounding, Obama on Tuesday night dropped his veneer of reserve and appeared to delight in having proved his critics wrong.”

What exactly is the proof?

“Jobs are up, but wages are down,” noted Politico’s Timothy Noah about December’s job numbers. “In five-and-a-half years of economic recovery, the median income should have increased. Instead, it is lower. … Stagnating wages have displaced unemployment as the nation’s chief economic concern, and wages are becoming a central political concern too.”

Ironically, the Post’s own fact-checkers, after taking apart the President’s speech, found that “it is too early to say that this positive response from small businesses means ‘wages are finally starting to rise again.’” In other words, our President lied—again.

“Politicians can lower the U-3 [unemployment] rate—and make things seem better than they are—by making it easier for people to leave the workforce,” noted Schalin.

At a national level, welfare dependency is at higher levels now than under George W. Bush, millions of Americans are signing up for Obamacare subsidies, the rich are getting richer while the poor are getting poorer, and median income is now comparable to 1995 levels. “Today median income is on par with where it was in 1995, which is one of the reasons many Americans still don’t feel the economy has truly improved,” reported CNN Money in December in the last line of its article.

The first line touted more positive Obama-centric news: “The Obama recovery was looking a lot better on Friday after a particularly strong jobs report made 2014 the best year for hiring since 1999.” CNN must have thought it could put some positive spin on this official numbers game.

In the last year of Bush’s presidency, 17.1 percent of Americans received welfare assistance. That figure now stands at nearly one in four—23 percent—according to Shapiro.

“A 2013 Pew Research study of U.S. Census Bureau data found simply that the rich got richer and the poor got poorer during the Obama economic recovery,” reports Shapiro. The study stated that our recovery boosted the incomes of the upper 7 percent by over a quarter, while the “mean net worth” of households in the remaining 93 percent “dropped by 4%.”

Chuck Todd of NBC News’ deserves a veritable medal for media bias. He opened his co-authored article, “Telling the Recovery Story: Obama Hits the Road to Tout Economy,” by pointing to Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick’s (D) criticism of the President that “one problem I think that the president has is that he doesn’t tell that story [the “explosive growth in corporate profits, in stock market returns, employment that’s come back strong”] very well or very regularly.”

“Well, Obama is now trying to tell that story a bit better,” comment Todd and his co-authors.

“One reason why the White House feels more confident in touting the economy is that the country has seen its longest stretch of good economic news during Obama’s presidency,” he and his co-authors wrote. “And that’s been reflected in a media that usually emphasizes bad news over good news.”

Todd has said in the past that he found his off-the-record conversations with President Obama “very nourishing.”

Simply put, a lot of Americans can’t—and won’t—swallow economic spin of such mammoth proportions, either from the media or from our President.

01/28/15

Carol O’Cleireacain: Why is a Marxist Running Detroit’s Economic Recovery?

By: Trevor Loudon
New Zeal

In October of 2014, new Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan appointed Dr. Carol O’Cleireacain as Deputy Mayor for Economic Policy, Planning & Strategy.

 Carol O'Cleireacain‎

Carol O’Cleireacain‎

According to Mayor Duggan, O’Cleireacain would be responsible for identifying “outside sources of funding” for the city so that it becomes financially stable outside of bankruptcy.

“Our ability to live within the Plan of Adjustment once it is approved can’t rely solely on traditional revenue sources because they can fluctuate based on conditions we can’t control,” Duggan said in a statement. “I’ve charged Dr. O’Cleireacain with identifying new funding sources to help insulate ourselves against these unknowns so the city can provide a consistent level of service.”

Detroit Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr had hired O’Cleireacain before the Mayor and Detroit City Council legally revoked his powers. Duggan, however, continued the appointment when he retook full control of the city.

“Mayor Duggan is setting a strong tone of fiscal accountability with his administration and I’m thrilled to have been asked to play a role,” O’Cleireacain said in a statement. “The mayor is building a great team that is going to transform the way Detroit meets the needs of its residents for years to come.”

Sounds great – except that Carol O’Cleireacain has been a card-carrying Marxist, who presided over New York City’s finances during one of the Big Apple’s most depressed periods, the 1990-93 Dinkins’ mayoralty.

O’Cleireacain came to Detroit from New York City, where she is a nonresident senior fellow at the leftist Brookings Institute, a think tank that is based in Washington, DC and an adjunct faculty in management and urban policy at the even more leftist New School. She is also a member of the “nonprofit, nonpartisan” Council on Foreign Relations.

O’Cleireacain moved to New York City in 1976 at the height of that city’s fiscal crisis and served 13 years as chief economist at District Council 37 AFSCME, a union notoriously controlled by Marxists led by the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee. DSOC, would in 1982, merge with the New American Movement (an amalgam of mainly former Students for a Democratic Society and Communist Party USA members) to form Democratic Socialists of America.

O’Cleireacain was first identified as a Democratic Socialists of America member in DSA’s Democratic Left, Sep./Oct. 1987, page 9, while she was serving as assistant to the executive director of AFSCME, District Council 37, Stanley Hill – another DSAer.

In 1990, another DSA comrade, David Dinkins, was elected mayor of New York on the back of a big campaign mounted by DSA, organized labor and the Communist Party.

Dinkins immediately appointed several Marxists to key positions in his administration (including current Mayor Bill de Blasio and Carol O’Cleireacain.

DSA’s Democratic Left, May/June 1990, page 8, proudly noted that their member, Carol O’Cleireacain, had been appointed Commissioner of Finance for New York City.

The same year, Democratic Socialists of America sent a delegation to the October 1990 Socialist International meeting in New York, which included DSA’s permanent representative to the SI, Bogdan Denitch; DSA Honorary Chair, Cornel West; Pat Belcon, a DSA NPC member; Motl Zelmanowicz, a “DSAer active in the Jewish Labor Bund;” Jo-Ann Mort, a DSA NPC member; Jack Sheinkman, president of ACTWU; Terri Burgess, chair of the DSA youth Section; Skip Roberts, Chair of DSA’s Socialist International Committee; and NYC Commissioner of Finance, Carol O’Cleireacain. She had briefly became NYC budget director in the last days of the Dinkins’ administration.

The Center for Democratic Values, a “progressive think-tank” developed with Democratic Socialists of America sponsorship, made its first public appearance at the Socialist Scholars Conference in New York, on April 12-14. 1996. CDV cosponsored two panels at the conference and held a reception to introduce the Center to the assembled socialist scholars and activists.

The first panel dealt with rethinking the role of government. The discussion centered around a paper authored by DSA member and CDV organizer David Belkin (a policy and budget analyst in the office of the Manhattan Borough President), which “challenged the left to seriously reopen the issue of the role of government in a democratic society.” Carol O’Cleireacain, former New York City Budget Director, another member of the panel, “stressed the need for the left to pay more attention to organization and management as well as policy and structure, the traditional focuses of socialist theories.”

Here is a photo from the late 1980s of Carol O’Cleireacain wearing the badge of DSA’s Institute for Democratic Socialism. DSA’s “rose and fist” symbol can be clearly seen.

carolo'cleraicannn

Carolo

As late as 2009, O’Cleireacain was still serving on the Editorial Board of Dissent Magazine, alongside well known DSA comrades Joanne Barkan, Paul Berman, Mitchell Cohen, Bogdan Denitch, Cynthia Fuchs Epstein, Todd Gitlin, Michael Kazin, Deborah Meier, Harold Meyerson, Jo-Ann Mort, Patricia Cayo Sexton and Cornel West.

Detroiters are wise to remember that DSA played a big role in wrecking Detroit in the first place. After socialists seized control of the United Auto Workers, they used union muscle and money to elect Marxist politicians all over the state – including to the Detroit City Council.

One of their greatest victories was the election in 1973 of Coleman Young, a bona fide Communist Party member posing as a Democrat, to the Detroit mayoralty.

Young presided over a Council, stacked with socialists, whose cronyism, corruption and over-regulation drove an already teetering city off the financial cliff. Socialist influence on the Council continued until recent times under DSA aligned Councillors Maryann Mahaffey, and JoAnn Watson, revolutionary Marxist Ken Cockrel, Sr., and Communist Party supporters Erma Henderson and Clyde Cleveland.

While in charge of New York City’s finances, Carol O’Cleireacain computerized the city’s tax system, massively increasing revenues. Sound fiscal policy perhaps, but not the kind of shock Detroit’s very fragile business community could easily handle today.

But Carol O’Cleireacain may not actually care that much about private businesses anyway.

In an article in DSA’s Democratic Left, Spring 2007, DSA National Political Committee member and Greater Detroit Democratic Socialists of America Chairman David Green, wrote in support of the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) – or “card check”.

What distinguishes socialists from other progressives is the theory of surplus value. According to Marx, the secret of surplus value is that workers are a source of more value than they receive in wages. The capitalist is able to capture surplus value through his ownership of the means of production, his right to purchase labor as a commodity, his control over the production process, and his ownership of the final product. Surplus value is the measure of capital’s exploitation of labor…

Green went on to write:

Our goal as socialists is to abolish private ownership of the means of production. Our immediate task is to limit the capitalist class’s prerogatives in the workplace…

In the short run we must at least minimize the degree of exploitation of workers by capitalists. We can accomplish this by promoting full employment policies, passing local living wage laws, but most of all by increasing the union movement’s power…

Will this be Carol O’Cleireacain’s strategy for “saving” Detroit? More taxes, more regulations, stronger unions? Where will the “outsourced” revenue come from? What happens when American businesses and taxpayers are bled dry? Chinese interests?

Hasn’t America’s once greatest city suffered enough from socialists?

Trevor Loudon is an author, activist and political researcher from Christchurch New Zealand.

He is best known for exposing the ties between a young Barack Obama and Hawaiian Communist Party member Frank Marshall Davis, as well as exposing the communist background of former Obama “Green Jobs Czar” Van Jones. Loudon’s latest book, The Enemies Within: Communists, Socialists and Progressives in the U.S. Congress, is designed to expose the comprehensive communist, socialist and extreme progressive infiltration of the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate.