04/26/15

Gay Marriage: A Trojan Horse Movement

The Left doesn’t care about gay rights, any more than they care about civil rights, welfare rights, minority rights, animal rights or any other “rights.” According to the Left, “the issue is never the issue; the issue is always the revolution.” The various “rights” the Left has aggressively promoted over the years are merely vehicles to advance the Left’s power.

Consider: the welfare “rights” movement, founded by the notorious socialists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, was not established to guarantee welfare to the poor. As they said, their purpose was to pack the welfare rolls with so many beneficiaries that the government would collapse of its own weight. In the ensuing riots, they hoped policy makers would be driven to accept their socialist solution. In short, they sought anarchy, using a militant poor as their foot soldiers. They couldn’t care less what happened to the poor in prosecuting this agenda, and they said so. Doubt me? Just look at the status of the poor today. There are more people on welfare than at any time in history. And the crime and degeneracy that accompany it are epidemic.

Look at our country today. With manufactured crisis Strategist-in-Chief Obama, we are almost there, and Cloward and Piven’s intellectual descendants were out in force in Ferguson. The communist agitators seeking “social justice” for Michael Brown burned down much of the neighborhood. Do black lives matter to them? Apparently not. And they have even said so. The issue is not the issue.

Occupy Wall Street’s black anarchist organizer Nelini Stamp’s new group, Dream Defenders, popularized the slogan “Hands Up Don’t Shoot!” But prior to Ferguson there was Trayvon Martin. Working with Eric Holder’s DOJ, Stamp’s group was responsible for getting Sanford, Florida police chief Bill Lee fired. This despite the fact the FBI agreed with Lee’s assessment that there was no case against Martin’s killer, George Zimmerman. Did Stamp care about “Justice for Trayvon?” Not according to Stamp. “We are actually trying to change the capitalist system we have today, because it’s not working for any of us,” she said.

The Left uses “rights” agendas to wrap itself in the mantle of righteousness and seize the moral high ground, tactically putting us on the defense in the process. But they couldn’t care less about the actual issue except in its ability to facilitate their path to power.

The agenda is never the agenda for the Left. And this is especially true for gay marriage. Homosexual marriage is a Trojan horse tactic. The true agenda is to establish the primacy of homosexual rights over the First Amendment’s guarantee of the free exercise of religion. Our nation was founded on this principle, and the gay marriage movement seeks to destroy it.

Consider that Annise Parker, the lesbian mayor of Houston, Texas, demanded to review pastors’ church sermons before public outrage forced her to back off. We have already seen how small businesses have been singled out and attacked for refusing to provide certain services to gays.

What is less known is that these gay couples are frequently part of the movement. They deliberately seek out businesses known for their Christian owners. They deliberately demand a service they know in advance will be refused. When the inevitable happens they use it as pretext to destroy the business and savage its owners. Doesn’t it amaze you how quickly legal groups immediately materialize to assist in the attack? The fact that they got unexpected push back through a spontaneous crowd sourcing campaign to support one pizza shop will not dissuade them from future efforts. If gay marriage is adopted, their current bullying behavior will look like child’s play compared to what’s coming.

This is a highly organized, nationwide campaign of vilification against Christians. But even Christians are not the ultimate target. If the First Amendment can be challenged this way; if a certain group’s “rights” can trump the U.S. Constitution, and if the Supreme Court can actually issue an edict making it so, then the entire Constitution has become meaningless. This is the Left’s true agenda and it always has been. This is the Cultural Marxists’ endgame. The issue is not the issue. The issue for them has always been destroying our country to impose socialism — with them in charge, of course. In order to do that they have to strip America of its culture, its traditions, and most importantly, the most important law of the land, the U.S. Constitution.

We are almost there. Well-meaning liberals and even some conservatives who support the gay marriage agenda are unknowingly committing an act of betrayal against their own country. If the gay marriage agenda wins, those other rights guaranteed by the Constitution will immediately be at risk. Obama’s “fundamental transformation” of America will be complete. Everyone in our country, including gays, will find all our rights summarily stripped. And if the gay lobby wants to see what that looks like for them, they should turn to Cuba, Russia or North Korea for their inspiration. It will not go well for them. The Left does not care about your rights. They care about one thing and one thing only: their power.

I recently gave a presentation on cultural Marxism at the National Press Club. You can watch it on YouTube, here. It’s about 35 minutes long. It was part of the latest Cliff Kincaid press conference. I have attended and reported on many of them on these pages over the years. Keynote speaker was former presidential and senatorial candidate, Ambassador Alan Keyes, a brilliant orator and Harvard-trained intellectual powerhouse who clearly explained what is at stake. His logic and legal reasoning was flawless and irrefutable. Following his act was quite a challenge. Also in attendance were Matt Barber of Barbwire, and Peter LaBarbera of Americans for Truth. But together we painted a picture of what the true gay rights agenda looks like.

03/26/15

American Communists Travel to Cuba to Increase Support for Castro Dictatorship

By: Trevor Loudon
New Zeal

From left, Alberto Prieto, (Communist Party of Cuba International Relations Department), Zenobia Thompson, Camila Valenzuela, Fernando Gonzalez, Kenia Puig (ICAP president), Josh Leclair, John Bachtell

A delegation from the Communist Party USA, led by new National Secretary John Bachtell, recently visited Cuba. On Feb. 27th, the delegation stopped by the the Cuban Intelligence connected Cuban Institute for Friendship with the Peoples to “discuss building friendship, cooperation and people to people exchanges in light of the Dec. 17 announcement to reestablish diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Cuba.”

Among those who warmly greeted the delegates were Fernando Gonzalez, one of the infamous “Cuban 5” who was jailed in the U.S. in 1998 as part of a “mission to monitor right-wing Cuban terrorist activities in Miami being directed against Cuba.” Several people died as a result of Gonzalez’s espionage.

According to Bachtell:

We found Gonzalez warm, gracious and eager to speak about exploring ways to build friendship with the U.S. people. He also shared stories about his time in U.S. prisons, the people he met and the extraordinary solidarity he and the Cuban 5 received over the years.”

The most important thing to say, to express on my behalf, my family and relatives, is my deep gratitude to the CPUSA because of the years of participation in the struggle, the solidarity you accorded us during the time we were in prison and for our liberation.

You were side by side with us. Even when things look dark, there’s always a bright side. No one wants that experience (of imprisonment). It gave us the chance to experience the best of the U.S. people and those we worked with for many years, side by side in that fight.

Gonzalez made it clear that the Castro regime made no concessions in return for Communist Party connected President Barack Obama‘s diplomatic recognition of the dictatorship.

During the second round of negotiations between the U.S. and Cuba we haven’t made any concessions. And with the return of all the Cuban Five it was a great victory for the Cuban people and all friends in the U.S. who have participated in struggle and for friendship between our countries.

Diplomatic recognition of Cuba is a “win win” for Marxists, both in Washington DC and Havana.

Soon Obama “crony capitalists” will be able to export more American jobs to Cuban sweatshops, while Cuban communists can more easily export spies, revolutionaries and drugs to the United States.

03/18/15

THE CRIMINAL ARROGANCE OF HILLARY CLINTON

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.”

02/15/15

Are We Seeing History Repeat Itself?

By: Alan Caruba
Warning Signs

“Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it” is the famed quote of George Santayana, a Spanish philosopher (1863-1952). I am beginning to think that the world is making its way toward a future that repeats the horrors of the last century’s wars and earlier times when Europeans battled Islam to free Jerusalem, to protect their homelands in Europe, and to eject Muslims from Spain.

In his book, “Jihad in the West: Muslim Conquests from the 7^th to the 21^st Centuries” historian Paul Fregosi documented the history of Islam and its attacks on European nations, characterizing jihad as “essentially a permanent state of hostility that Islam maintains against the rest of the world.” It is a Muslim sacrament, a duty they must perform.

Occurring at the same time is the agenda of the global environmental movement and on February 4 Christina Figueres, the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, said “This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves; which is to intentionally transform the economic development model, for the first time in human history.”

“This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for the, at least, 150 years, since the industrial revolution.” (Italics added)

Figueres was wrong. The objective of the 1917 Communist revolution that began in Russia and Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” (1958-1961) was the same that is now being openly embraced by the United Nations in 2015. The result of both was the death of millions.

Humanity is under attack from an Islam that intends to impose its barbaric seventh century Sharia law and from the environmental movement’s intention to end capitalism and replace it with the income distribution central to Communism.

Both spell a terrible future for the people of the world.

The President of the United States is devoted to pursuing both of these goals as the defender of Islam and the opponent of “income inequality.” We have twenty-two months to survive Barack Obama’s remaining time in office.

Obama was first elected on the promise to end the U.S. engagement in conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. After many years Americans welcomed the prospect of ceasing the loss of lives and billions those wars represented. With the rise of the Islamic State (ISIS) they are now seeing the true price of that policy. Just because we don’t want to fight a war doesn’t mean our enemy will cease to pursue it.

We are at a critical moment in time because it is evident that Obama wants to provide Iran the opportunity to build its own nuclear weapons arsenal. It is a time as well when the military capability of the U.S. has been diminished to what existed before the beginning of World War II. All of Europe and much of Asia would have fallen under the control of Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan if the U.S. had not stepped up to the task of defeating them.

Relentlessly, Obama has done everything he can to reduce the size of our military fighting force and the ships, planes and other weapons needed to protect our security or support that of our allies. He has withdrawn the U.S. from its position of global leadership and left behind allies that no longer trust us and enemies who no longer fear us.

Raymond Ibrahim of the Middle East Forum wrote on February 5 that “approximately 100 million Christians around the world are experiencing the persecution by Muslims of all races, nationalities, and socio-political circumstances.”

At the same time, we are witnessing a new exodus of Jews from Europe, mindful of the Holocaust in the 1940s. According to the Pew Research Center, as of 2013 the Jewish population worldwide was approximately 14 million. Just over 6 million reside in Israel, another 6 million are U.S. citizens, and the rest are in Europe and elsewhere around the world. What has not changed from the last century, however, is the level of anti-Semitism and it appears to be on the rise.

What we are witnessing is a full-scale attack on the West—Christianity and Judaism—and upon Western values of morality, democracy, and freedom.

Whether it will erupt in a new world war is unknown, but if history is a guide, we are moving in that direction.

02/11/15

Obama’s Dangerous Iran Nuke Deal

By: Alan Caruba
Warning Signs

The Feb 10 Wall Street Journal editorial asked

“Has the U.S. already conceded a new era of nuclear proliferation?” and concluded that “Mr. Obama is so bent on an Iran deal that he will make any concession to get one.”

As we should know by now, President Obama has no negotiating skills and even less understanding of the world the U.S. used to lead by virtue of its military power and democratic values.

If he succeeds in getting a deal, absent Congress doing anything about it, the Wall Street Journal says it will result in “a very different world than the one we have been living in since the dawn of the nuclear age. A world with multiple nuclear states, including some with revolutionary religious impulses or hegemonic ambitions, is a very dangerous place.”

Yes, but. We already live in such a world and the real question is whether, absent their “revolutionary” rhetoric, shouting “Death to America!” and “Death to Israel!” do those at the top levels of the Iranian ruling structure want to risk having their nation destroyed if they were ever to use nuclear weapons?

No nation on Earth has done so since the U.S. ended the war with the Japanese Empire with two atom bombs rather than put at risk the lives of our troops in an invasion. Why do we think Iran would use their nukes if they acquired them?

The short answer is that the United Nations has passed six resolutions to deny Iran the capability of developing a military nuclear program and the current negotiations, the P5+1, while led by the U.S., are joined by Russia, China, France, the United Kingdom and Germany.

Nations in the Middle East and around the world are inclined to think the Iranian leadership would use such weapons. Obama is intent on ignoring their judgment.

If you want to know why Iran continues to be involved in negotiations to restrict its nuclear weapons agenda, you need to know that the U.S. will release $11.9 billion to Iran by the time the talks are concluded in June. That’s the figure cited by our own State Department.

On January 21, the U.S. released $490 million, the third such payment since December 10. For sitting at the negotiations table, Iran will secure $4.9 billion in unfrozen cash assets via ten separate payments by the U.S. It had received $4.2 billion in similar payments under the 2013 interim agreement with the U.S. and was given another $2.9 billion by the Obama administration last year in an absurd effort to get them to agree to end their effort to become a nuclear power.

In a sense there are several Iran’s. There is the Iran of the Supreme Leader and the Revolutionary Guard, both committed to the Islamic revolution that brought the present day Iran into being in 1979. They value having a nuclear weapons capability no less than the U.S. or other nations do.

Then there are the Iranian realists who would far prefer a detente between the U.S. and Iran because they believe it would be in both our interests. These are the voters who elected Hassan Rouhani in 2013 to replace Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who has served in office from 2005. They represent some 70% of its citizens would want peace, trade and normal relations with the U.S. Their leaders, however, have thoughts of hegemonic power in the Middle East to advance Shiite Islam.

The problem is that many of the Iranian leadership do not speak in terms other than an utter contempt for the U.S. and with an outspoken enmity for any nation that opposes the expansion of Islam. In late January, one of its newspapers, Kayhan, reported that “Professors, students and employees at the Imam Sadeq University, condemning the insults against the prophet of Islam by Charlie Hebdo…demand closure of the French embassy in Tehran.”

The demonstrators carried placards read, “I am not Charlie, I am the innocent child of Gaza”, “Death to America”, “Death to Israel”, “Death to Britain”, “Death to France”, ‘Death to Wahabism” and comparable signs all indicative of Iran’s hostility to any response to the terrorism it has sponsored for decades since the Islamic Revolution was initiated there in 1979.

On January 23, Iran’s Foreign Minister, Mohammad-Javad Zarif, addressed the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, saying “I do not believe that ten years of confrontation will have had any benefits for anyone. Ten years of sanctions has yielded 19,800 centrifuges, exactly that which the sanctions wanted to halt.”

There is no question that sanctions and the long negotiations have reduced Iran’s capacity to create nuclear weapons agenda. The current negotiations, however, are signaling an abandonment of that policy.

At Friday prayers in late January, Hojjat al-Eslam Zazem Sediqi told those in attendance “Our statesmen should know the enemy, should know with whom they are dealing and negotiating with…You are speaking with wild beasts which do not show mercy to (anyone) young or old, and who insult the Prophet, the most sacred of sacred.”

The Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDC) maintains a constant monitoring of Iranian news media and government outlets. The reported news out of Iran paints a picture of fire-breathing zealots against a moderate political class and population. The question is whether the zealots will have the final word.

On January 28, Ali Alfoneh, a FDC senior fellow, authored a policy brief that concluded that “Even in the unlikely event that Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and his negotiating team reach a nuclear agreement with international negotiators, its implementation may well fall to the Islamic Revolutionary Corps…The IRGC’s vociferous opposition to nuclear concessions and improving ties with the West raises serious questions over whether future Iranian governments will uphold any nuclear deal that the current one signs.”

There are two major power centers in Iran, the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, and the IRGC. Rouhani is routinely referred to as “a moderate.” As Alfoneh noted, “Meanwhile, Rouhani’s cabinet is torn between public demands for jobs and human rights, the creeping infiltration of the IRGC, and the Supreme Leader’s dogged attempts to maintain the status quo at all costs.”

In late January, the Democrats on Capitol Hill, led by Robert Menendez (D-NJ) gave Obama another two months to reach a deal before they vote for new sanctions. In the House, progressives are urging their colleagues to hold off moving any legislation that would tighten economic penalties on Iran. At this point, the only thing that has worked has been sanctions and the return of frozen funds, a form of bribery.

Meanwhile, Iran has taken credit for the training and arming of Shiite rebels who overthrew the leadership in Yemen. Iran also supports the Hezbollah in Lebanon that is threatening Israel from the area of the Golan. In reprisal for a recent attack, Israel responded with an air strike that killed an Iranian general. None of this helps position Iran as a potential peaceful partner.

This is why John Boehner, the Speaker of the House, has invited Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to address a joint session of Congress. He did so without consulting the White House, but we should keep in mind that Obama released five Taliban generals from Gitmo without consulting Congress.

Netanyahu will spell out what he has said in the past. A nuclear Iran is an existential and a potentially catastrophic threat to Israel. He will likely point out that it is a threat to Saudi Arabia and all the other nations in the Middle East and worldwide.

The question is whether we are dealing with rational people leading Iran or not. In the end, we are asked to assume that even the Supreme Leader and the Revolutionary Guards want to live, want their children and grandchildren to live, and want their nation to continue. That is what Obama is betting on. The problem with that is that Islam puts a high value on martyrdom.

02/11/15

Net neutrality a looming threat to free speech

By: James Simpson
WatchDog.org

The Federal Communications Commission will vote on a new “net neutrality” regulatory framework for the Internet on Feb. 26. FCC has already been stopped in its tracks twice by federal courts which have ruled that the FCC has no authority to impose such regulations. Not to be thwarted, the Obama administration has doubled down, declaring the Internet a public utility subject to regulation under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934.

Shutterstock Image
While 64 percent of journalists believe the government has spied on them, the FCC’s looming net neutrality decision could have repercussions for free speech online.

While the administration promises a bonanza of new benefits, this regulatory framework will stifle innovation, hobble Internet startups, and ultimately place the heavy hand of government on both accessibility and new media content.

What is Net Neutrality

Mention that name and eyes glaze over. In concept, net neutrality is the idea that the Internet should be equally accessible, i.e. “neutral,” to all comers. Thus, a blogger should have equal access to Internet speed and capability as say Netflix, for example. Under contemplated net neutrality rules, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) like Verizon and Comcast would not be allowed to charge higher prices for more access.

Thus companies like Netflix—which utilizes about 35 percent of total Internet traffic at peak times—could not be charged a premium. Small startups would have the same kind of access. So the argument goes that net neutrality will encourage competition and facilitate the growth of new Internet startups.

What’s the matter with that? In concept, nothing. In practice, everything.

Access to the Internet and Internet speeds are enabled by bandwidth, i.e. the amount of instructions that can be carried across an Internet cable or wirelessly at a given time. Like everything else in the real world, supply of bandwidth is limited, and expanding bandwidth capacity is expensive.

Bandwidth also requires electrical energy– the more used, the more power required. Those companies whose products require massive amounts of bandwidth, like Netflix, pay higher prices, one way or another. ISPs also charge different rates for residences and businesses and charge different rates for faster download/upload speeds.

This is like paying a higher price for overnight versus two or three-day mail delivery. Netflix is, in effect, purchasing a different product than, say, Joe Blogger. The market has always rationed supply of goods and services this way, and it is the most effective method for equitably distributing limited resources. It is the reason the American economy flourished for 200 years, and why the Internet, largely unregulated for the past 20 years, has experienced explosive growth.

The Heavy Hand of Government

Enter the FCC. Title II of the Communications Act of 1934 was applied to the telecommunications industry in its infancy. It brought us Ma Bell and AT&T, regulated monopolies that stifled innovation in telecommunications for decades. It was not until microwave technology offered an alternative to traditional long line telephone service that the regulated monopoly began to crack. Now the FCC wants to impose the same kind of regime on the Internet.

Net neutrality is being sold as a method to make broadband access inexpensive, but to paraphrase P.J. O’Rourke, “If you think [the Internet] is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it’s free.” Net neutrality is a form of price control, and price controls everywhere distort the market. By affording equal access to all comers at below cost, demand will skyrocket while supply dries up. If an ISP cannot provide Internet access at a profit, it will go out of business. The government will then step in to take its place.

And it won’t be cheap. FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai, who opposes the plan, recently warned that it will give FCC power to micromanage virtually every aspect of the Internet. “If you like dealing with the IRS, you are going to love the President’s plan,” he says. According to Pai, this is what’s coming:

Billions of dollars in new taxes, higher prices and hidden fees
Reduced investment in broadband networks, slower internet speeds and less access
A move from a largely unregulated Internet to a regulated monopoly

Pai’s predictions are not theoretical. Local governments all over the country have experimented with creating government-run ISPs using money obtained from President Obama’s stimulus and other taxpayer financing. They have been unqualified disasters.

Just as Obamacare will slowly squeeze private insurers out of the market, with the ultimate objective becoming a government-run, single-payer health care system, private ISPs will find it increasingly difficult to compete with taxpayer-subsidized government ISPs. The ultimate outcome will be complete government control of the Internet.

Net neutrality has been called socialism for the Internet. Robert McChesney, co-founder of the left-leaning Free Press and author of Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Away from Democracy, made this explicit in an interview with the Socialist Project:

What we want to have in the U.S. and in every society is an Internet that is not private property, but a public utility… At the moment, the battle over network neutrality is not to completely eliminate the telephone and cable companies. We are not at that point yet. But the ultimate goal is to get rid of the media capitalists in the phone and cable companies and to divest them from control.

McChesney explains why getting rid of the “media capitalists” is so important:

It is hard to imagine a successful left political project that does not have a media platform… Instead of waiting for the revolution to happen, we learned that unless you make significant changes in the media, it will be vastly more difficult to have a revolution. While the media is not the single most important issue in the world, it is one of the core issues that any successful Left project needs to integrate into its strategic program. (Emphasis added).

This viewpoint is not about having “equal access.” It’s about having an information monopoly. The interrelated goals of net neutrality are thus to first seize control of the Internet, then influence content.

A Pew Research survey published on Feb. 5 reports that fully 64 percent of journalists believe the government has spied on them, and 80 percent think that being a journalist makes them a target of such spying. Given the administration’s demonstrated hostility to news media, and its heavy reliance on it to craft the president’s image, would one expect more freedom of expression following the planned government takeover of the Internet, or less?

If that question doesn’t keep you awake at night, the Federal Election Commission held a hearing on Wednesday to discuss contemplated new regulation regarding political speech on the Internet.

This article was written by a contributor of Watchdog Arena, Franklin Center’s network of writers, bloggers, and citizen journalists. Thanks to Seton Motley of Less Government.org and Watchdog.org’s Josh Peterson who contributed to this report.

01/5/15

Pro-North Korea Communists Defend Pyongyang, Condemn “The Interview” Call For Black Revolution

By: Trevor Loudon
New Zeal

Nick Maniace

Just recorded. Nick Maniace of the Workers World Party condemns US military “who commonly commit rape against South Korean civilians,” US “biological and chemical warfare” and espionage against North Korea, praises North Korea’s support of Black Panther revolutionaries and condemns “The Interview” as “hate speech and war propaganda.”

Did you know there was “no homelessness, no starvation… the people’s needs are being met” in the People’s Democratic Republic of Korea?

His comrade Monica Moorehead then goes on to talk up the “uprising against police terror” in the USA. “Now people are questioning the role of the police… this is going to bring people around to Marxism, to revolutionary thinking.”

This would be laughable, if the Workers World Party weren’t one of the major players in the recent wave of unrest across the United States.

12/30/14

Obama’s Anti-Cop Jihad

By: William Michael
misterchambers

The Protests were Organized for one Specific Purpose – Dead Cops

In December 2012, a respected Egyptian news magazine named six Obama administration officials who were in fact agents of the international terrorist organization, the Muslim Brotherhood. They claimed that these individuals had helped change the White House “from a position hostile to Islamic groups and organizations in the world to the largest and most important supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood.”

One of these alleged agents was Imam Mohamed Magid, a Koranic scholar from Sudan. In the Obama administration, Magid was appointed to the Department of Homeland Security’s Countering Violence and Extremism working group in 2011. He is on the FBI’s Sikh, Muslim, and Arab advisory board (yes, we have one of those). He has trained and advised personnel affiliated with the FBI and other federal agencies.

Under Obama’s dictates since he entered the Oval Office, the United States government decided to publicly announce a softer approach to countering Islamic terrorism and the ideology behind jihad (i.e., war in the name of Islam). Imam Mohamed Magid has been a centerpiece in Obama’s show of tolerance (of violence) and diversity (of means of death), so much so that he and his organization have been “cited … as the primary means of outreach to the American Muslim community.”

It’s now known that Magid has a remarkable connection to the murderer of two NYPD officers this December.

***

Unlike his approach toward American Muslims, who apparently (at least based on policy since 2009) need the White House to reassure them that they are not “violent extremists,” Barack Hussein Obama’s attitude toward police officers has been hostile from the beginning. Multiple instances mar the six year old administration’s relationship with law enforcement.

The anti-police stance of the administration has been toxically mixed with anti-gun propaganda, and the blatant fanning of racial tensions that have resulted in violence, murder, and even city-wide chaos.

The first example came in July 2009, when Harvard Professor Henry Louis ‘Skip’ Gates was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct by the Cambridge Police department. Sgt. James Crowley saw Gates trying to break into a home, and, not realizing it was actually his own home, arrested Gates. The charges were later dropped by the police, but not before Obama said on national television that the police “acted stupidly,” and further insinuated that the arrest was racially motivated. To make everyone feel better, Obama later held a “beer summit” at the White House, hosting Gates and Crowley in what was presented as some great healing moment. (No word on whether pork or all beef hot dogs were served.)

In 2011, Attorney General Eric Holder, while noting that the number of officers killed in the line of duty jumped 13% that year, blamed the increase on illegal gun ownership. In 2013, Holder went on the record saying that he had to tell his son how to protect himself from the police, because, you guessed it, he’s black. Holder said this talk was family tradition.

For his part, Obama came out in support of the 2011 anti-cop and anarchist movement, Occupy Wall Street, who were not only occupying Wall Street, but terrorizing downtown Manhattan.

Then came the February 2012 shooting death of Trayvon Martin in Florida. Martin was shot by George Zimmerman, as he was being violently assaulted and threatened with death while on neighborhood patrol. In what has become a national tradition, Al Sharpton and Eric Holder descended to prey upon the citizens of a small community, calling for “justice.”

In fact, mob justice is what they were looking for.

The next stop for the Obama, Holder, and Sharpton anti-police racial mob circus was Ferguson, Missouri, following the death of Michael Brown by the gun of a police officer who he was attacking and threatening. The case is familiar and fresh enough in everyone’s minds not have to rehash in any detail. Once again, Obama and the administration issued thinly veiled attacks on the police and insinuated that the officers and the department were racially motivated haters.

The caustic and raw social tumult that ensued led to widespread looting, riots, arson (even by allegedly “peaceful” protestors), and even the murder of a friend one of the trial witnesses.

Obama’s, Holder’s, and Sharpton’s carnival of hate then went prime time, this time to the Big Apple. If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. And, with a little help from the all-too-willing Mayor Bill DeBlasio, in the Staten Island death of Eric Garner, which was caused not by bullets but by a lung condition, the carnival got what they were looking for all along: the blood of police officers.

On December 20, 2014, five days before Christmas, Officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu were assassinated by Ismaaiyl Abdullah Brinsley in their patrol car in Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn. After weeks of anti-police protests, which explicitly shouted for “dead cops,” Brinsley had bragged to pedestrians just prior to the shooting that he was going to satiate the protestors with their pound of flesh.

***

At this time, you may be asking what Mohamed Magid, the alleged Muslim Brotherhood agent, has to do with the assassination of two NYPD officers. This will be clear to you soon enough. But first it is necessary to understand that the supposedly grassroots protests, in Ferguson and in New York, were anything but organic.

Terresa Monroe-Hamilton at NoisyRoom.net has documented the nefarious players behind the protests, and has an incredible list of organizations involved in the protests. One of the most prominent organizing groups is ANSWER, which stands for Act Now to Stop War and End Racism. ANSWER is often found alongside Occupy Wall Street. A little digging into ANSWER’s coalition partners and speakers reveal their roots; groups such as the Muslim Students Association, Free Palestinian Alliance, National Council of Arab Americans, the Nicaragua Network, and Korea Truth Commission (you got me ?).

Furthermore, ANSWER is described by DiscoverTheNetworks as “a principal player in all anti-war and pro-Palestinian demonstrations… ANSWER was formed a few days after 9/11 as a ‘new anti-racism, anti-war, peace and justice’ group and led its first protest just weeks later against the impending US-led attack on Afghanistan.”

To be blunt about it, ANSWER is a pro-jihad front organization that was fully behind Hamas in this summer’s Gaza war. Hamas, it’s noted, is the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood – the same Muslim Brotherhood that the Egyptian magazine claimed Mohamed Magid was a member of.

***

Isn’t it odd that a Muslim Brotherhood front group would lead protests in New York City over the accidental death of a black man in the course of an arrest? Last time I was there, Staten Island wasn’t a center of Israeli-Palestinian debate, and there are no public pictures of Eric Garner smoking hookah or riding camels in Giza. On the contrary, Garner was dealing single cigarettes, and tobacco is decisively haram (forbidden) according to Islamic sharia law.

Puzzling, perhaps, but the Facebook page of Ismaaiyl Abdullah Brinsley Muhammad ties the story’s loose ends together. According to his own biography on Facebook, Brinsely-Muhammad “Worked at: Islamic Society of North America.” The Islamic Society of North America, aka ISNA, is headquartered in Plainfield, Indiana. Hmm.

Who is the President of ISNA, where the cop killer said he worked? That would be Imam Mohamed Magid, Obama’s advisor to DHS and the National Security Council.

Obama himself addressed ISNA’s annual convention in 2013. You can read about one of ISNA’s greatest influences, Pakistani radical Abul A’la Maududi, here.

Here are a few other facts to consider when contemplating that the Obama and Holder-inspired cop killer was, according to himself, employed at the organization of one of Obama’s most trusted security advisors, the Islamic Society of North America.

ISNA President and Obama advisor Imam Mohamed Magid was a lecturer at Howard University, teaching courses on the Koran.
The Trayvon Martin case only caught on after it was plucked from relative obscurity from a student at Howard University. This student, Kevin Cunningham, began a petition on the website change.org. Said Cunningham, a lawyer, “that’s how I think about life, is to be a social engineer.”
Cop killer Brinsley-Muhammad, who additionally may have attended a Brooklyn mosque associated with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, martyred himself by suicide in a subway station before being apprehended by police. He’s no longer with us to answer any questions.
In light of Obama’s recent embrace of Communist Cuba, it is worth noting that one of Castro’s last acts as a revolutionary leader was to order the targeted killing of Cuba’s police officers. Why? Police keep law and order on the streets, and because they’re uniformed, they’re easy targets for revolutionaries who thrive off anarchy.

Obama’s six yearlong anti-cop jihad has serious consequences. In 2014, there was an increase of 56% in police killed by guns – 50 officers, compared to 32 in 2013. Since the assassinations in New York, many infractions are going unpunished, as police are reluctant to engage with the community, fearing targeting by assassins and mobs. This is a very tenuous and delicate situation.

It might be worth mentioning, to the next person you bump into who still has a functioning brain, that Obama’s trusted advisor, Imam Mohamed Magid, had the NYPD cop killer as an employee of his nationwide Islamic organization. This, according to his own Facebook bio.

The circumstantial evidence presented above points to a deliberate plan by the administration and the Muslim Brotherhood to stoke violence that led to cop killings. These are revolutionary tactics, creating conditions that lead to chaos, anarchy, and eventually the total dissolution of societal trust. After that occurs, people beg for order, in whatever form it offers itself.

Is 2015 the year of the American Spring? In the New Year, several detailed reports will be published that point to deliberate, witting, and eager cooperation between the Obama administration and the Muslim Brotherhood aimed at precisely this end.

12/21/14

Subversion: Attacks on Police are Part of a Long Term Program

By: Trevor Loudon
New Zeal

If you want to understand Julian Assange Wikileaks, the Edward Snowden affair and the current campaign against the United States police, watch this hour long video. From the 1980s, the video will make it clear that all these supposedly spontaneous movements are part of an ongoing, KGB and Cuban directed campaign to de-stabilize and eventually destroy America.

Firstly the House un-American Activities Committee was abolished, then the CIA and FBI were weakened, discredited and compromised. Now the military is being gutted, the NSA is severely compromised and the police are being attacked and discredited… even killed.

None of this is an accident.

This video explains exactly why America is in the position it is in today.