Our Marxist Wizard of Oz

By Peter Ferrara

 

Obama's not in Kansas anymore.

His mother was an unabashed hippie from 1960s central casting. His father was an openly avowed Communist from Kenya. While his father wasn't around much, his devoutly progressive grandparents arranged for him to be mentored during his adolescent years by a dues paying member of the U.S. Communist Party, Frank Marshall Davis.
When he went to college, he was attracted to the Marxist professors and student activists, according to his own published memoirs. When he graduated, he moved to Chicago and became an instructor for the left-wing extremist organization ACORN in the social manipulation methods of radical Marxist agitator Saul Alinsky. He attended for close to two decades the Trinity United Church of Christ, which practiced neo-Marxist Black Liberation Theology. That church was headed during those years by the openly socialist Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who declared that the 9/11 terrorist attack on America was "America's chickens coming home to roost." He also famously preached from his pulpit, "Not God bless America, God damn America…."


He launched his political career in the living room of the home of Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, co-founders and former leaders of the openly Communist domestic terrorist organization, the Weather Underground. That organization conducted several bombings in America and engaged in other violence that resulted in several injuries and even deaths.
All of this is documented in the public record. This is the man the Democrat party took off the streets of Chicago, then pursuing a career as a Marxist street agitator, and launched into the White House, favoring him over Hillary Clinton because she was too moderate for the party. They did that because he best reflects the heart and soul of today's radical-left, Che Guevara Democratic Party. It is in this context that we should understand and analyze Obama's Hugo Chavez speech given last week at Osawatomie High School in Kansas.
Obama's Hugo Chavez Coming Out
In that speech, he drew a picture of America as a struggling third world nation, saying at stake today "is whether this will be a country where working people can earn enough to raise a family, build a modest savings, own a home, and secure a retirement." In fact, he said, "there are millions of working families in this country who are now forced to take their children to food banks for a decent meal."
This sounds more like Indonesia, or Venezuela, or Nicaragua. But it is not America "long before the recession hit."
He explained the roots of the problem as:

Over the last few decades, huge advances in technology have allowed businesses to do more with less, and made it easier for them to set up shop and hire workers anywhere in the world…. Steel mills that needed 1,000 employees are now able to do the same work with 100, so that layoffs were too often permanent, not just a temporary part of the business cycle…. If you were a bank teller or a phone operator or a travel agent, you saw many in your profession replaced by ATMs or the Internet.

This Luddite analysis fundamentally misconceives the role of technology in a modern economy. Such advancing technology increases worker productivity, and, therefore, wages and standard of living. Technological progress over the decades is why the average American worker in 2000 enjoyed 7 times the standard of living of the average American worker in 1900.
He then tries to pin the blame for his failures on others, saying, "Now, in the midst of this debate, there are some who seem to be suffering from a kind of collective amnesia. After all that's happened, after the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, they want to return to the same practices that got us into this mess."
The policies that got us into this mess included primarily the so-called "affordable housing policies" Obama himself and other Democrats long advocated, with the government forcing the banks by overregulation to drop their traditional lending standards to provide loans and mortgages to low and moderate income applicants who could not qualify under those traditional standards. (See the full documentation and discussion in Paul Sperry's The Great American Bank Robbery: The Unauthorized Report About What Really Caused the Financial Crisis and Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner's, Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed, and Corruption Led to Economic Armageddon.
The other major factor was the Fed's loose monetary policy starting under Bush in the 2000s, which funded the housing bubble. Both policies were departures from the fundamental planks of Reaganomics. As I discuss in detail in my own book, America's Ticking Bankruptcy Bomb, the four planks of Reaganomics had been effectively abandoned by 2008, and that was the cause of the financial crisis, which ended the 25-year economic boom from 1982 to 2007 that Reaganomics had created.
Obama tries to continue his historical revisionism, saying, "Remember that in those years, in 2001 and 2003, Congress passed two of the most expensive tax cuts in history, and what did they get us? The slowest job growth in half a century. Massive deficits that have made it much harder to pay for the investments that built this country."
Here is what really happened. Those Bush tax cuts quickly ended the 2001 recession, despite the contractionary economic impacts of 9/11, and the economy continued to grow for another 73 months. After the rate cuts were all fully implemented in 2003, the economy created 7.8 million new jobs and the unemployment rate fell from over 6% to 4.4%. Real economic growth over the next 3 years doubled from the average for the prior 3 years, to 3.5%.
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