06/6/16

The Red Guards Are Green

By: Cliff Kincaid | Accuracy in Media

The media have given the misleading impression that the policies of Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), a self-declared socialist, are radically different than those of President Obama or Hillary Clinton. In reality, they all propose to use government power to control the economy by either confiscating the assets of private firms or running them out of business.

Technically, this may be fascism, rather than socialism. But the totalitarian nature of what is taking place is unprecedented in American history. America is becoming a socialist state that not only determines the fate of private industry, but attempts to control what people think and read about important public policy issues.

In Venezuela, which is admittedly ruled by a socialist regime, an iconic firm called Empresas Polar, which provides everything from pasta to beer, is suffering under government price controls and regulations, and has been declared an enemy of the state. The Wall Street Journal has been covering the fate of this firm in detail in a dramatic series of articles.

Here, the problem is actually worse. Rather than targeting just one firm, the Obama administration has been seeking to destroy the entire coal industry, along with the jobs of tens of thousands of workers that the old-style Marxists used to claim to represent. In their latest move, “the Obama Administration is giving the industry its last rites by halting new coal leases on federal lands where mining is still profitable,” the Journal noted.

This is not just Obama’s policy. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that if she became president, “we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.”

The official Democratic Party policy of destroying the coal industry is being done in the name of saving the environment from alleged global warming. Toward that end, Obama signed the Paris Climate Agreement for the purpose of reducing global CO2 emissions. But he refused to submit the agreement for Congressional approval. The Global Warming Policy Foundation has published an academic paper which says the agreement is essentially a fraud, adding that it exempts countries such as China and India from undertaking any reductions.

In order to stifle debate over the job-destroying policies of the Obama regime, a group of Democratic state attorneys general are using legal tactics in an effort to criminalize and prosecute those challenging the global warming theory.

In an interview conducted by Ginni Thomas and carried by The Daily Caller, Dr. Kim Holmes, author of The Closing of the Liberal Mind, says the criminalization of dissent on climate change is “truly Orwellian” and “borderline totalitarian.” It is another sign of the decline of American democracy, documented in another important book, Democracy: And Why It Will Fail in America.

At the same time, the Portland (Oregon) Public School Board has voted to ban textbooks and other materials that do not support the theory of climate change. Patrick Wood, Editor of Technocracy News & Trends, asks, “Will they ban materials from the homes of students? What will be the punishment for being caught with such materials on Portland Public School campuses?”

The left-wing group Rethinking Schools calls this Portland, Oregon, board decision “the country’s most far-reaching policy on teaching climate justice in the schools.” It says the policy commits Portland schools to “abandon the use of any adopted text material that is found to express doubt about the severity of the climate crisis or its roots in human activity,” and requires the school district to develop a comprehensive plan to “address climate change and climate justice in all Portland Public Schools.”

This is, of course, occurring on a local level. But one could easily anticipate the Obama administration adopting this policy on a national basis, in the form of a directive to local districts, similar to the federal dictate on bathroom policy.

This agenda can be called fascism or socialism. But another “ism” also rears its ugly head.

Bill Bigelow, a former teacher and current curriculum editor of Rethinking Schools, has referred to Howard Zinn as “the great historian and activist.” Zinn, whose books are force-fed to young people on many college campuses, was not only a member of the Moscow-controlled and Soviet-funded Communist Party USA (CPUSA) but lied about it. Zinn taught in the political science department of Boston University for 24 years, from 1964 to 1988.

Bigelow is the co-editor of a textbook on environmental education, A People’s Curriculum for the Earth. It looks like his campaign is at least partly designed to get his own textbook into the schools. Indeed, the group reports that Portland’s resolution “began in a workshop” led by the book’s co-editors, Bill Bigelow and Tim Swinehart. Swinehart, who teaches at Lincoln High School in Portland, is an alumnus of the Lewis & Clark Graduate School of Education and Counseling.

Commenting on the campaign to criminalize dissent on climate change, Dr. Kim Holmes said, “Once you break that barrier and tell scientists they will be punished, this is like the Inquisition in the 16th century or the Red Guard in the Cultural Revolution in China.”

Ironically, the Roman Catholic Church is involved in this modern-day inquisition, since Pope Francis has already issued a papal encyclical on climate change in an “unholy alliance” that includes anti-capitalist and pro-population control advocates.

The Red Guards were groups of students, formed under the auspices of the Chinese Communist Party, which eliminated remnants of the old order.

How different is that from what is happening in the U.S. today? The group Rethinking Schools says that what happened in Portland could inspire similar efforts around the country, leading to “millions of public school students” who would then become part of a nationwide army of activists recognizing “a climate emergency” that requires “shutting down coal-fired power plants, banning new pipelines and off-shore drilling.”

Swinehart declares, “Now the real work begins: transforming the principles of this resolution into the education of climate literate students across the district who feel empowered to work toward a more just and sustainable future.”

These new Red Guards are coming to a school district near you. Can we rescue America from mysticism and tyranny?

Cliff Kincaid

Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism and can be contacted at [email protected].View the complete archives from Cliff Kincaid.

10/10/15

Sanders Adviser Calls for Repeal of Columbus Day

Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media

Near the end of Mel Gibson’s film “Apocalypto,” we see Christian missionaries arriving in the New World to save the natives from a culture of death that celebrates beheadings and human sacrifices to pagan Gods. Gibson has said he based the dramatic landing scene on the fourth expedition of the great Italian explorer Christopher Columbus. But celebrating the spread of Christianity has become so politically incorrect that a New Age adviser to Democratic presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has called for repealing Columbus Day.

Marianne Williamson, a prominent supporter of Sanders and his “political revolution,” writes in her book, The Healing of America, that Columbus was “a murderer of indigenous peoples,” and says his life “was a model for the standard of enslavement and killings that came to characterize much of European settlement in the New World…”

She insists that Columbus Day, which was declared a federal holiday in 1937 by President Franklin Roosevelt, must be repealed.

“When it comes to celebrating Columbus or Columbus Day we should just say no,” she writes. She proposes that Columbus Day be replaced by “Immigrants’ Day.”

Williamson, founder of The Peace Alliance and the campaign to establish a U.S. Department of Peace, has been doing much in the political realm other than promoting Sanders and writing about his “revolutionary” vision on the Sanders campaign website. She is sponsoring a conference in Washington, D.C. this month featuring such luminaries as Phil Donahue and promoting “personal peace” and the teaching of “peace in schools.”

In this context, a former teacher who is the curriculum editor of a group called Rethinking Schools and the co-director of the Zinn Education Project hasproposed the abolition of Columbus Day and creation of what amounts to an “Indigenous Peoples Lives Matter” movement. The name “Zinn” refers to Howard Zinn, the Communist Party member who rewrote American history in favor of a “people’s struggle” against evil elites.

While Sanders has embraced Williamson, even speaking at one of her “Sister Giant” feminist conferences, it’s not clear if Sanders favors the tearing down of theColumbus Memorial Fountain, which is located at Union Station in Washington, D.C., just a few blocks from Sanders’ Senate office.

What’s more, there are images of Columbus throughout the U.S. Capitol complex. One shows Columbus examining a globe and chart, using an octant, mercury barometer, and magnetic compass to plan his voyages.

The attack on America’s history as a nation of European immigrants is not new, although the involvement of New Agers and Bernie Sanders supporters like Williamson in this assault doesn’t get any attention in the press. Sanders is usually portrayed as a nice man who believes in a “democratic” version of socialism, unlike the Soviet approach.

However, many Americans are tired of the trashing of their nation’s European roots and are now pushing back against the attempt to smear the reputations of those like Columbus who brought Christian civilization to natives who practiced savagery and barbarism.

An interesting historical fact is that the Columbus voyages were designed to counter the influence of global Islam. “By sailing west, Columbus was aiming to outflank Islam, gaining access to the riches of the East so as to finance the retaking of Jerusalem,” writes Ben Broussard. “Since the fall of Constantinople in 1453 [to Muslim armies], while Columbus was still a child, calls had come from all corners of Europe to renew the Crusade. Columbus saw himself as the instrument to fulfill the longed-for end.”

While the politically correct major media avoid the truth about the reasons for the voyages and what motivated the discovery of the New World, bloggers are stepping forward to answer the question, “Why was Columbus looking for a trade route to the East?” The Citizen Warrior blog notes that “during its second great jihad, Islam had invaded Central Asia and defeated Constantinople in 1453, cutting off the overland route for Europeans. Islamic armies continued their jihad northward, and conquered much of what is now Eastern Europe, until they were finally stopped at the gates of Vienna in 1683 (on September 11th).”

In his book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (And the Crusades), Robert Spencer confirms this, noting that the march of Islam had closed the existing trade routes to the East and that Columbus was trying to “bypass the Muslims” and make it possible for Europeans to reach India by sea.

The Order Sons of Italy in America (OSIA), an organization of men and women of Italian heritage in the United States, has vigorously defended Columbus in a report entitled “Columbus: Fact Vs. Fiction.” However, the report notes that since 1992 “special interest groups” have “used this 15th century Renaissance navigator to further their 21st century political and social agendas.”

Of course, we know these “special interest groups” are the anti-American and Marxist-oriented organizations whose agendas include denigrating America’s Founding Fathers as white racists who oppressed the natives.

There was a time when Democrats and Republicans honored Columbus and didn’t bow to political correctness. In a statement on Columbus Day issued in 1940, President Roosevelt declared, “The courage and the faith and the vision of the Genoese navigator glorify and enrich the drama of the early movement of European people to America. Columbus and his fellow voyagers were the harbingers of later mighty movements of people from Spain, from Columbus’s native Italy and from every country in Europe. And out of the fusion of all these national strains was created the America to which the Old World contributed so magnificently.”

The OSIA report notes that while left-wing activists portray the New World at the time of the arrival of Columbus as an earthly paradise, the natives “practiced cannibalism, ritual human sacrifice and slavery and suffered from syphilis, hepatitis, addictive cocaine use and cancer, caused by smoking.”

The Gibson film “Apocalypto” depicts the human sacrifices in dramatic and graphic scenes, as human hearts are literally cut out of victims and offered up to their sun god. A Mayan priest then chops off a victim’s head, holding it high and then rolling it down a stairway.

In a review, Dr. Peter Hammond, Director of Frontline Fellowship, writes, “By the time the Christians arrive, we have a far greater understanding of what life was like in Central America before the blessings of European civilization brought an end to the incessant genocidal tribal warfare, rampant slavery and human sacrifices of idolatrous paganism.”

The bloody pre-Christian paganism that preceded the arrival of the Christian missionaries is what is now being sold as a Garden of Eden that America should be celebrating instead of Columbus.

With abortions being performed in the U.S. at the rate of over 3,000 per day, and baby parts being harvested for profit, as documented by the Center for Medical Progress, one can only conclude America is already well on its way back to barbarism.

But Marianne Williamson, who ran for Congress on a “pro-choice” platform, thinks honoring Columbus gives America a bad name. That Bernie Sanders embraces her and gladly accepts her advice says a lot about the nature of the Sanders socialist “revolution.” Williamson calls it a “Revolution of Love” against a “sociopathic economy” that requires meditation. “Ignite the change,” she concludes.

Who will defend Christian civilization and Columbus against this New Age socialist gibberish?

07/11/15

Pope Transforms Papacy to Political Pulpit

By: Denise Simon
FoundersCode.com

Pope Francis has applied his authority and the Catholic Church altering Catholic doctrine and message to high stakes politics. He has solicited high stakes policy wonks on the matter of Climate Change and his team is mobilized.

His shepherds, his Bishops, his Cardinals will install United Nations approved language and actions into all sermons, visits and religious message.

What a shame, there was such hope for renaissance of the Vatican yet it was short lived.

Note: Naomi Klein is a social activist who is against corporate capitalism, and has the DNA of peace activism and her grandparents were communists. She admits to being labeled a red-diaper baby where social justice and racial equality is her continued bent. Climate change is her mission. Klein is an acolyte of Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky proven by the third book she authored titled The Shock Doctrine.

Hence, she successfully gained the attention of Pope Francis.

From the Guardian:

Pope Francis recruits Naomi Klein in climate change battle

Social activist ‘surprised but delighted’ to join top cardinal in high-level environment conference at the Vatican

She is one of the world’s most high-profile social activists and a ferocious critic of 21st-century capitalism. He is one of the pope’s most senior aides and a professor of climate change economics. But this week the secular radical will join forces with the Catholic cardinal in the latest move by Pope Francis to shift the debate on global warming.

Naomi Klein and Cardinal Peter Turkson are to lead a high-level conference on the environment, bringing together churchmen, scientists and activists to debate climate change action. Klein, who campaigns for an overhaul of the global financial system to tackle climate change, told the Observer she was surprised but delighted to receive the invitation from Turkson’s office.

“The fact that they invited me indicates they’re not backing down from the fight. A lot of people have patted the pope on the head, but said he’s wrong on the economics. I think he’s right on the economics,” she said, referring to Pope Francis’s recent publication of an encyclical on the environment.

Release of the document earlier this month thrust the pontiff to the centre of the global debate on climate change, as he berated politicians for creating a system that serves wealthy countries at the expense of the poorest.

Activists and religious leaders will gather in Rome on Sunday, marching through the Eternal City before the Vatican welcomes campaigners to the conference, which will focus on the UN’s impending climate change summit.

Protesters have chosen the French embassy as their starting point – a Renaissance palace famed for its beautiful frescoes, but more significantly a symbol of the United Nations climate change conference, which will be hosted by Paris this December.

Nearly 500 years since Galileo was found guilty of heresy, the Holy See is leading the rallying cry for the world to wake up and listen to scientists on climate change. Multi-faith leaders will walk alongside scientists and campaigners, hailing from organisations including Greenpeace and Oxfam Italy, marching to the Vatican to celebrate the pope’s tough stance on environmental issues.

The imminent arrival of Klein within the Vatican walls has raised some eyebrows, but the involvement of lay people in church discussions is not without precedent.

Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general, delivered the keynote address at a Vatican summit in April on climate change and poverty. Anticipating the encyclical, he said he was depending on the pope’s “moral voice and moral leadership” to speed up action.

When it came to the presentation of the document itself, the pontiff picked a five-strong panel, including a Rome school teacher and a leading scientist. Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, who heads the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, used the time to give churchmen a lesson in climate science.

The pope has upset some conservatives for drawing people from outside the clergy into the heart of the debate, while critics have also argued the Catholic church should not be involved in an issue that should be left to presidents and policy-makers.

But Klein said the pope’s position as a “moral voice” in the world – and leader of 1.2 billion Catholics – gives him the unique ability to unite campaigners fighting for a common goal. “The holistic view of the encyclical should be a catalyst to bring together the twin economic and climate crises, instead of treating them separately,” she said.

Much of the pope’s discourse focuses on the need to give developing countries a greater voice in climate change negotiations, a view that sits uncomfortably among some in developed nations. “There are a lot of people who are having a lot of trouble in realising there is a voice with such global authority from the global south. That’s why we’re getting this condescending view, of ‘leave the economics to us’,” said Klein.

She views the rise of Francis as an environmental campaigner as marking a welcome shift not only in the international sphere but also at the Holy See: “We’re seeing the power base within the Vatican shift, with a Ghanaian cardinal [Turkson] and an Argentine pope. They’re doing something very brave.”

While the upcoming conference is centred on the pope’s encyclical, delegates will also be looking ahead to decisive international meetings this year. Before the Paris talks comes a UN summit, where states are due to commit to sustainable development goals, which will inevitably affect the environment.

The pope will fly into New York on the first day of the meeting and address the UN general assembly, reinforcing his message and emboldening countries worst affected by climate change.

For Klein, the papal visit will mark a much-needed change in the way negotiators discuss the environment. “There’s a way in which UN discourse sanitises the extent to which this is a moral crisis,” she said. “It cries out for a moral voice.”

03/12/15

Catholic Church Captured by “Progressive Forces”

By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media

Armando Valladares, Castro’s political prisoner for 22 years, said his Catholic faith was strengthened behind bars by hearing young Catholics shouting “Viva Cristo Rey,” for “Long Live Christ the King,” and “down with communism!” as they faced the firing squad. It has been his hope that Cuba would one day be free of communism. But he is far less hopeful now that Pope Francis has taken measures that he says “objectively favor the political and ecclesiastical left in Latin America” and could undermine the “Christian future of the Americas.”

Meanwhile, Marxist writer Richard Greeman has written an extraordinary article, “Catholicism: The New Communism?,” arguing that “progressive forces” have “captured” the Vatican, and that Francis is conducting a “purge” of traditional elements, such as those loyal to anti-communist Pope John Paul II.

Valladares, author of Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro’s Gulag, was the United States Ambassador to the U.N. Human Rights Commission under the Reagan and Bush administrations. He writes in a recent column that Francis was the “most eminent architect and mediator” of the Obama administration deal with Cuba that will “now provide the repressive apparatus of the Cuban regime with rivers of money and favorable publicity.”

He goes on, “We are witnessing one of the greatest examples of media sleights-of-hand in history: From a well-deserved image of aggressor, a regime which for decades spearheaded bloody revolutions in Latin America and Africa and continues to spread its tentacles in the three Americas, has been craftily made to look like a victimized underdog.”

He says the responsibility lies with the unexpected rise of a Francis-Obama “axis” in foreign affairs that benefits Marxist governments throughout Latin America.

Valladares, who received the Citizen’s Presidential Medal from President Ronald Reagan, was sentenced to 30 years in prison in communist Cuba in 1960 for being philosophically and religiously opposed to communism. He was tortured and kept in isolation for refusing to be “re-educated.” He was released after 22 years in prison, in 1982, when international pressure was brought to bear on the regime.

Valladares says it’s not just the Cuba betrayal that concerns him. He notes that Francis overturned the suspension of Nicaraguan priest Miguel D’Escoto Brockmann, a former communist Sandinista foreign minister and a leading pro-Castro figure in liberation theology.

Despite his credentials as a political prisoner turned human rights activist and powerful voice for freedom, his column on the Obama-Francis “axis” has received very little attention. An associate says it seems “too politically incorrect,” an apparent reference to the fact that Francis is a global media star for identifying with the poor, and that liberals and conservatives alike are reluctant to criticize him.

Valladares, however, says the pope has gone far beyond taking up the cause of poor people. His column notes that Francis personally attended something called the World Meeting of Popular Movements last October in Rome. “It gathered 100 revolutionary world leaders, including well-known Latin American professional agitators,” Valladares points out. “The meeting turned out to be a kind of marketing ‘beatification’ of these Marxist-inspired revolutionary figures.”

One of the participants in the Vatican event was Evo Morales, the Marxist President of Bolivia who dedicated his election victory last year to Cuba’s Fidel Castro and the late Venezuelan Marxist ruler, Hugo Chávez.

The Vatican’s own description of the meeting referred to changing “an economy of exclusion” and “an idolatrous system of money.” The statement went on, “Together we want to discuss the structural causes of so much inequality (inequidad) which robs us of work (labor), housing (domus) and land (terra), which generates violence and destroys nature. We also want to face the challenge Francis himself sets puts [sic] to us with courage and intelligence: to seek radical proposals to resolve the problems of the poor.”

Valladares isn’t the only one to notice the “radical” or leftward drift of the papacy. Greeman’s article wondering if Catholicism is the “new communism” appears in New Politics, a socialist magazine “committed to the advancement of the peace and anti-intervention movements” and which “stands in opposition to all forms of imperialism…”

New Politics has strong links to the Democratic Socialists of America, a group that backed Barack Obama’s political career from the start. Its “sponsors” include Noam Chomsky, Frances Fox Piven, Michael Eric Dyson, Barbara Ehrenreich, Cornel West and the late communist historian Howard Zinn.

Greeman notes that the world’s Catholic Bishops have “explicitly pointed to capitalism as the basic cause of impending global catastrophe,” in the form of climate change, and have “called for a new economic order.” He was referring to a group of Catholic Bishops who met at the U.N. climate talks last December and blamed “the dominant global economic system, which is a human creation,” for global warming. They argued for “a new financial and economic order” and the phasing out of the use of fossil fuels.

Greeman says the Bishops’ attack on capitalism was generally ignored, even on the left, and he understands why. There have been so many “rapid changes” coming out of Rome “since the ascension to the Throne of Saint Peter” by Pope Francis that it is hard to keep up with them, he says.

Francis will issue a Vatican document, known as an encyclical, on climate change in June or July.

Greeman writes that these “radically anti-capitalist Catholic positions” have got him wondering whether Catholicism is “the new Communism,” Rome “the new Moscow,” and the church “the new Comintern.” The term “Comintern” refers to the Communist International, an association of national communist parties started by Lenin.

Growing up as a “red diaper baby” during the Cold War, Greeman writes, Catholicism was “synonymous with militant anti-Communism.” But changes that started coming years ago in the church have been accelerating under Francis, he writes. He attributes some of this “change” to Francis, who is from Buenos Aires, Argentina, and a Jesuit, which is a “progressive” religious order whose “solid organization and discipline” and “attempts to take over the Church” go back centuries.

Greeman refers to the Catholic or “universal” Church as “the only actually existing organized world-party,” whose “vast wealth and influence are now in Francis’ hands.” He writes about “the capture” of the church by “progressive forces,” a development which opens up “huge possibilities for human liberation and perhaps a chance for the planet to avoid climate catastrophe.” He believes Francis “and his allies” are now conducting a “purge of the apparatus” in the Vatican.

Writing in Links, an international socialist journal, Canadian activist Judith Marshall discusses meeting the pope during the World Meeting of Popular Movements and witnessing his presentation to the group. “Pope Francis’ forthright statements on the social ministry of the church hearken back to the 1960s and 1970s when liberation theology was such a dynamic force in promoting struggles for social justice, particularly in Latin America,” she wrote. “The symbolism of a World Meeting of Popular Movements which brought a multitude of the poor right into [the] heart of the Vatican has not been lost on those looking for a resurgence of liberation theology.”

Liberation theology was manufactured by the old KGB to dupe Christians into supporting Marxism.

She also insisted that Francis “has arguably made the Papacy the most radical and consistent voice in pointing to the profanity of global inequality and exclusion. He has also repeatedly named the inordinate power of multinational corporations and finance capital as key factors in reproducing global poverty and destruction of the planet.”

She says Francis met with several Marxist activists from Latin America and even met privately with President Morales of Bolivia who “stressed how Mother Earth had become ill from capitalism,” and that “under the prevailing global economy, the planet would actually do better without humans—but humans need the planet.”

In a previous meeting Morales told the pope, “For me, you are brother Francis.” The pope responded, “As it should be, as it should be.”