The Fair Society

“To take from one, because it is thought his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers, have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, the guarantee to everyone the free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it.” — Thomas Jefferson, letter to Joseph Milligan — 1816.

For the first 12 years on my life I lived with my parents in a rented house in the inner city of Cleveland Ohio. Life there was not bad as I was living with our extended family in old, drafty three-story house. My dad worked hard and my mom worked part-time in order to save up enough money to buy a new home in Parma, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland. In 1948 we moved to this new home and said good bye to Cleveland’s inner city with its growing crime rate and bad management by a corrupt Democratic Party machine.

The vacant lot is where my house in the inner city of Cleveland once stood

Abandoned house on the street where I lived in Cleveland. Typical of the area

Abandoned retail business with living quarters in the neighborhood where I once lived.

I didn’t realize it at the time but this was my parent’s exercising the Constitution right for Life, liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness by working hard to no longer be tenants, but to become owners of their own property — something they were very proud of.

House in Parma my Father purchased in 1948 and where I graduated high school from.

 

Street in Parma where our 1948 house was situated as it looks today (2011)

This phenomenon of upward mobility continued all over the United States for the next 60 years as people fled the dismal, mismanaged cities with rising crime rates, lousy facilities, and failing schools to move to what we call the suburbs. At the time this was called “white flight”, but over the ensuing years all races and creeds have taken flight from the decaying cities like Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles. Husbands, and sometimes wives, worked hard to acquire the funds to make a down payment on a house in the suburbs where they could breathe clean air, own their homes, and where their children could attend better schools. They also believed they could have more control over how their community and schools were managed and property taxes were allocated.

As the home ownership in the suburbs grew businesses shopping malls, industrial parks, movies theaters, churches, schools, highways, and business centers soon followed. This was America of the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s. It’s where the people wanted to live and raise their families. It should also be pointed out that with the creation of the suburbs our economy grew in leaps and bounds as millions of jobs were created in the construction and allied industries. This was post-war America where wealth was being created and people were living better lives. The United States had the highest percentage of home ownership in the world at 70%.

On the other hand the old inner cities were dying as the people were fleeing and the tax-base was decreasing. More and more of the people left were on welfare and did not own their own homes. Even government financed housing projects soon became crime-ridden ghettos. The inner city schools became worse and K-12 graduation rates decline to as low as 45%. With the failing graduation rates and test scores these children were not able to obtain good jobs or higher education and many turned to crime and gangs — even with the advantages of President Johnson’s Great Society, Model Cities, and affirmative action. Today this is the state of inner cities. They have become warehouses for the welfare class.

With all of the billions poured into The Great Society and the War on Poverty our cities have gotten worse not better. There is no doubt that education, children have children, and the massive welfare state are the main contributors to this mess. The Teachers Unions resist charter schools and school vouchers. Politicians pander to the inner city voters offering more and more free stuff. And in almost all of these failing cities the dominant political party is the Democrat Party, and has been for the past 40 years.

The Great Society has failed the inner cities. Central government planning by experts and masterminds has failed. Massive infusion of federal government money has failed. Those who worked had to move to the suburbs and are willing to pay local property taxes to support those communities are being taxes more and more through their income taxes (federal and state) to subsidize the failing inner cities.

Now President Obama wants to create a new “Fair Society”. This one is called the “Regional Equity Management Program.” (Note the word “equity”). The goal of the REMP is basically to destroy the suburbs in order to build up the inner cities — in essence the property from the industrious, hardworking responsible “makers” and give it to the irresponsible “takers”, something our Founders such as Madison, Hamilton and Jefferson would find reprehensible. The opening paragraphs of Socialism and Democracy in its report entitled “Regional Equity is a Civil Rights Issue” states:

“The color line in the U.S. is nowhere more visible than between its cities and its suburbs. Urban America, comprised largely of people of color mired in poverty, is the flip side of White suburban prosperity. Gentrified urban neighborhoods and declining inner-ring suburbs are also two sides of that same coin. These patterns of racial and regional disparity define the landscape of metropolitan areas. They also reflect the maldistribution of power and opportunity. Indeed, White suburban privilege is made possible precisely because of urban distress and racial oppression. In short, it matters where one lives.

Despite these seemingly intractable conditions, progressives are increasingly challenging this social order. One strategy community organizers are pursuing is to inject themselves into current regional planning debates. Urban activists have turned towards regional level organizing because community-building efforts are being undermined by larger regional-and global-forces. Community builders are witnessing the undoing of hard-fought gains on a daily basis. Powerful actors and developments in other parts of metropolitan areas are severely altering the shape of urban neighborhoods-from the availability of jobs, housing, health care, education, and public space, to crime and punishment-no matter what activists and residents do. These conditions demand a new approach to community organizing: one that not only takes regional developments into account, but can also affect them.”

This is a program with the total support of Barack Obama and his administration. He stated as much in his 2007 speech at Hampton University where he said “we don’t need any more bridges and highways in the suburbs, we need the money in the inner cities.” What he failed to mention is that with the inner cities have a reduced tax base the people in the suburbs will have to pay for it. This what Obama considers “fair.”

As Thomas Sowell writes in Townhall:

“Senator Obama, as he was then, pointed out that this requirement was waived in the case of New York and Florida because the people there were considered to be "part of the American family." But the people in New Orleans -- predominantly black -- "they don't care about as much," according to Barack Obama.

If you want to know what community organizers do, this is it -- rub people's emotions raw to hype their resentments. And this was Barack Obama in his old community organizer role, a role that should have warned those who thought that he was someone who would bring us together, when he was all too well practiced in the arts of polarizing us apart.

Why is the date of this speech important? Because, less than two weeks earlier, on May 24, 2007, the United States Senate had in fact voted 80-14 to waive the Stafford Act requirement for New Orleans, as it had waived that requirement for New York and Florida. More federal money was spent rebuilding New Orleans than was spent in New York after 9/11 and in Florida after hurricane Andrew, combined.

Truth is not a job requirement for a community organizer. Nor can Barack Obama claim that he wasn't present the day of that Senate vote, as he claimed he wasn't there when Jeremiah Wright unleashed his obscene attacks on America from the pulpit of the church that Obama attended for 20 years.

Unlike Jeremiah Wright's church, the U.S. Senate keeps a record of who was there on a given day. The Congressional Record for May 24, 2007 shows Senator Barack Obama present that day and voting on the bill that waived the Stafford Act requirement. Moreover, he was one of just 14 Senators who voted against -- repeat, AGAINST -- the legislation which included the waiver.

When he gave that demagogic speech, in a feigned accent and style, it was world class chutzpah and a rhetorical triumph. He truly deserves the title Phony in Chief.”

President Obama is not a fan of America’s suburbs. Indeed, he intends to abolish them. With suburban voters set to be the swing constituency of the 2012 election, the administration’s plans for this segment of the electorate deserve scrutiny. Obama is a longtime supporter of “regionalism,” the idea that the suburbs should be folded into the cities, merging schools, housing, transportation, and above all taxation. To this end, the president has already put programs in place designed to push the country toward a sweeping social transformation in a possible second term. The goal: income equalization via a massive redistribution of suburban tax money to the cities.

Obama’s plans to undercut the political and economic independence of America’s suburbs reach back decades. The community organizers who trained him in the mid-1980s blamed the plight of cities on taxpayer “flight” to suburbia. Beginning in the mid-1990s, Obama’s mentors at the Gamaliel Foundation (a community-organizing network Obama helped found and based on the principles set forth by Saul Alinsky) formally dedicated their efforts to the budding fight against suburban “sprawl.” From his positions on the boards of a couple of left-leaning Chicago foundations, Obama channeled substantial financial support to these efforts. On entering politics, he served as a dedicated ally of his mentors’ anti-suburban activism.

The alliance endures. One of Obama’s original trainers, Mike Kruglik, has hived off a new organization called Building One America, which continues Gamaliel’s anti-suburban crusade under another name. Kruglik and his close allies, David Rusk and Myron Orfield, intellectual leaders of the “anti-sprawl” movement, have been quietly working with the Obama administration for years on an ambitious program of social reform.

In July of 2011, Kruglik’s Building One America held a conference at the White House. Orfield and Rusk made presentations, and afterwards Kruglik personally met with the president in the Oval Office. The ultimate goal of the movement led by Kruglik, Rusk, and Orfield is quite literally to abolish the suburbs. Knowing that this could never happen through outright annexation by nearby cities, they’ve developed ways to coax suburbs to slowly forfeit their independence.

One approach is to force suburban residents into densely packed cities by blocking development on the outskirts of metropolitan areas, and by discouraging driving with a blizzard of taxes, fees, and regulations. Step two is to move the poor out of cities by imposing low-income-housing quotas (Title 8 housing) on development in middle-class suburbs. Step three is to export the controversial “regional tax-base sharing” scheme currently in place in the Minneapolis–St. Paul area to the rest of the country. Under this program, a portion of suburban tax money flows into a common regional pot, which is then effectively redistributed to urban, and a few less well-off “inner-ring” suburban, municipalities.

(It should be noted that the term Section 8 refers to housing vouchers provided to low-income individuals and families by the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Some people have the mistaken impression that Section 8 housing refers to certain housing developments, and while HUD may maintain such housing, a person may use this voucher as a real estate allowance at any real estate rental available that accepts these vouchers. This means that a Title 8 voucher holder might be your neighbor).

The Obama administration, stocked with “regionalist” appointees, has been advancing this ambitious plan quietly for the past four years. Efforts to discourage driving and to press development into densely packed cities are justified by reference to fears of global warming. Leaders of the crusade against “sprawl” very consciously use environmental concerns as a cover for their redistributive schemes.

The centerpiece of the Obama administration’s anti-suburban plans is a little-known and seemingly modest program called the Sustainable Communities Initiative. The “regional planning grants” funded under this initiative — many of them in battleground states like Florida, Virginia, and Ohio — are set to recommend redistributive policies, as well as transportation and development plans, designed to undercut America’s suburbs. Few have noticed this because the program’s goals are muffled in the impenetrable jargon of “sustainability,” while its recommendations are to be unveiled only in a possible second Obama term.

Obama’s former community-organizing mentors and colleagues want the administration to condition future federal aid on state adherence to the recommendations served up by these anti-suburban planning commissions. That would quickly turn an apparently modest set of regional-planning grants into a lever for sweeping social change.

In light of Obama’s unbroken history of collaboration with his organizing mentors on this anti-suburban project, and his proven willingness to impose ambitious policy agendas on the country through heavy-handed regulation, this project seems likely to advance.

A second and equally ambitious facet of Obama’s anti-suburban blueprint involves the work of Kruglik’s Building One America. Traditionally, Alinskyite community organizers mobilize leftist church groups. Kruglik’s group goes a step further by organizing not only the religious left but politicians from relatively less-well-off inner-ring suburbs. The goal is to build coalitions between urban and inner-ring suburban state legislators, in a bid to force regional tax-base sharing on middle-class suburbanites. That is how the practice came to Minnesota.

The July 2011 White House conference, gathering inner-ring suburban politicians for presentations by Rusk and Orfield, was an effort to place the prestige of the Obama administration behind Kruglik’s organizing efforts. A multi-state battle over regional tax-base “sharing,” abetted by the president, would usher in divisive class warfare on a scale likely to dwarf the puny efforts of Occupy Wall Street.

Obama’s little-known plans to undermine the political and economic autonomy of America’s suburbs constitute a policy initiative similar in ambition to health-care reform, the stimulus, or “cap-and-trade.” Obama’s anti-suburban plans also supply the missing link that explains his administration’s overall policy architecture.

Since the failure of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty and the collapse of federal urban policy, leftist theorists of community organizing have advocated a series of moves designed to quietly redistribute tax money to the cities. Health-care reform and federal infrastructure spending (as in the stimulus) are backed by organizers as the best ways to reconstitute an urban policy without directly calling it that. A campaign against suburban “sprawl” under the guise of environmentalism is the next move. Open calls for suburban tax-base “sharing” are the final and most controversial link in the chain of a reconstituted and redistributive urban policy. President Obama is following this plan. This is what he calls “Fairness.”

Stanley Kurtz, the author of Spreading the Wealth: How Obama is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities writes about Obama’s plan for the Cleveland, Ohio in Townhall:

“President Obama aims to help Ohio’s Democrats bail out your state’s struggling cities by forcibly transferring suburban tax money to urban treasuries. It’s a bold plan to redistribute the wealth of Ohio’s suburbs. It also calls for halting the sort of highway and commercial development that brings jobs and taxes to the suburbs. The shorthand for this is “regionalism.” Should Obama be reelected, a redistributive city-based regionalist agenda will likely be imposed on Ohio’s suburbs. The best way to envision the future of suburban Ohio in a second Obama term is to see how close this regionalist agenda came to enactment in Obama’s first four years.

Around 2006, Cleveland-area planners began floating proposals to grant the city access to taxes collected by surrounding suburbs. Their model was the Minneapolis–St. Paul region, where the Minnesota state legislature forces reluctant suburbanites to “share” their tax revenue with the cities. Cleveland’s regionalists also touted Portland, Ore., for its metropolitan planning agency. Portland’s planning commission has laid down an “urban growth boundary” that forbids highway or commercial development around the edges of the metropolitan area. Regionalists blame the plight of the cities on the loss of tax base to the suburbs. Blocking new highways that could ease commutes or serve as gateways to newly constructed suburbs is designed both to prevent further exodus and to press current suburbanites back toward the cities. This is what Obama was getting at in that recently released 2007 video where he said, “We don’t need to build more highways out in the suburbs.”

As written in the Regional Equity as a Civil Rights Issue:

“Regional-level solutions-particularly at the political level-can address varying kinds of problems that affect different groups. The challenge regionalism poses for community-builders is to forge effective coalitions that make racial and class equity a central part of their everyday operation. Fortunately, recent successes by groups promoting regional equity offer direction and promise. While there is much ground yet to cover, the mobilization of democratic regionalists has begun to reshape the color line-not in the manner of those who push for colorblind policies (such as abolishing affirmative action and bilingual education) - but on their own terms. Community organizers are moving resources to people and people to resources, making regionalism a civil rights issue.”

According to the definition, as stated by the Department of Agriculture Regional Equity is:

“A provision enacted in the 2002 Farm Act that requires that each State be allocated an amount of conservation funding through specific conservation programs, that collectively exceeds a predetermined minimum amount.”

This provision has very little to do with farms and a great deal more to do with cities and suburbs. Political experts left and right agree: the coming election will be decided by America’s suburbanites. From Florida to Virginia on across the country, in every battleground state, they are the key demographic. All of which raises a question that has not been considered as yet, and ought to be: is President Obama’s re-election in the suburbanites’ interest? The answer emphatically is no. Yet this issue has all but been buried in the MSM.

As many Americans do not know, in the eyes of the leftist community organizers who trained Obama, suburbs are instruments of bigotry and greed — a way of selfishly refusing to share tax money with the urban poor. Obama adopted this view early on, and he has never wavered from this ideological commitment, as a review of his actions in office goes to show.

President Obama’s plans for a second-term include an initiative to systematically redistribute the wealth of America’s suburbs to the cities. It’s a transformative idea, and deserves to be fully aired before the election. But like a lot of his major progressive policy innovations, Obama has advanced this one stealthily — mostly through rule-making, appointment, and vague directives. Obama has worked on this project in collaboration with Mike Kruglik, one of his original community organizing mentors. Kruglik’s new group, Building One America, advocates “regional tax-base sharing,” a practice by which suburban tax money is directly redistributed to nearby cities and less-well-off “inner-ring” suburbs. Kruglik’s group also favors a raft of policies designed to coerce people out of their cars and force suburbanites (with their tax money) back into densely packed cities. And you wonder why Obama is not concerned about the price of gasoline approaching five dollars per gallon and is opposed to drilling for more oil or the Keystone Pipeline.

Obama has lent the full weight of his White House to Kruglik’s efforts. A federal program called the Sustainable Communities Initiative, for example, has salted planning commissions across the country with “regional equity” and “smart growth” as goals. These are, of course, code words. “Regional equity” means that, by their mere existence, suburbs cheat the people who live in cities. It means, “Let’s spread the suburbs’ wealth around” – i.e., take from the suburbanites to give to the urban poor. “Smart growth” means, “Quit building sub-divisions and malls, and move back to where mass transit can shuttle you between your 800 square foot apartment in an urban tower and your downtown job.” In all likelihood, these planning commissions will issue “recommendations” which Obama would quickly turn into requirements for further federal aid. In fact, his administration has already used these tactics to impose federal education requirements on reluctant states. Indeed, part of Obama’s assault on the suburbs is his effort to undercut the autonomy of suburban school districts.

Suburbs are for sellouts: That is a large and overlooked theme of Obama’s famous memoir, Dreams from My Father. Few have noticed the little digs at suburban “sprawl” throughout the book, as when Obama decries a Waikiki jammed with “subdivisions marching relentlessly into every fold of green hill.” Dreams actually begins with the tale of an African American couple who’ve come to question their move from city to suburb – the implication clearly being that the city is the moral choice.

Early on in Dreams, Obama tells of how his mother and Indonesian step-father, Lolo Soetoro, were pulled apart by a proxy version of the American dream. Lolo got a job with an American oil company, bought a house in a better neighborhood, and started dining at the company club. Obama’s mother, who had come to Indonesia in search of Third World authenticity, wanted nothing to do with the “ugly American” types who frequented this new world, and she taught her son to disdain them as well. From Obama’s perspective, American-inspired upward mobility had broken his new family in two.

Back in Hawaii after his Indonesian interlude, Obama came to see his grandparents as strangers. The realization dawned as they drove him along a sprawl-filled highway. Obama then threw in his lot with an African-American mentor named Frank Marshall Davis, who lived in a ramshackle pocket of the city called the “Waikiki Jungle” where his home was a gathering place for young leftists and nonconformists. Rejecting assimilation into America’s middle-class, Davis hit on socialist politics and identification with the urban poor as the way to establish his racial credentials.

In Dreams from My Father Obama describes Davis’s efforts to pass this stance on to Obama. At Occidental, with Davis’s advice in mind, Obama worried that he was too much like “suburban blacks, students who sit with whites in the cafeteria and refuse to be defined by the color of their skin.” This fear of becoming a middle-class suburban “sellout” is the background to the famous passage of Dreams where Obama explains why he started hanging out with “Marxist professors” and other unconventional types. Recalling Davis’s admonition to reject the standard path to success, “the American way and all that shit,” Obama left Occidental’s suburban campus for Columbia University, “in the heart of a true city.”

To this day, Obama quietly coordinates his administration’s policies on urban/suburban issues with Kruglik, Orfield, and Rusk. Kruglik’s anti-suburban battle is set to become one of the defining themes of Obama’s second term. Although calls for “regional tax-base sharing” will strike the public as something entirely new, the program is the fulfillment of the president’s lifetime ambition. Still trying to avoid being mistaken for a middle-class, suburban “sellout,” Obama has hit upon the ultimate solution: a massive redistribution of suburban tax money to America’s cities.

That would not be in the interests of America’s suburbanites or, ultimately, anyone else. Redistribution kills the growth that benefits everyone. Once voters realize that there has never been a president more ideologically opposed to the suburbs, or more reliant on redistribution as a policy, they should know what to do — especially all those suburbanites on whose judgment the election itself will turn. But, what will it take for the red flag of warning to be noticed by all who have worked so hard to attain the castle in the suburbs and live the American Dream?

Katrina vs. Sendai

"We should never despair, our Situation before has been unpromising and has changed for the better, so I trust, it will again." — George Washington

Last night I was having a conversation with my brother about how the Japanese were reacting to the recent spate of earthquakes, tsunami and nuclear reactor melt downs. We were noting how disciplined and organized the citizens of Japan were in their response to these disasters.

Of course to compare the behavior of the Japanese to that of Americans, or any other culture, is somewhat unfair. For centuries the Japanese have lived by a strict moral code respecting honor, family and country. It would be an act of serious matter for a Japanese to loot a store during a time of a disaster as it would bring dishonor to him and his family.

I recall several years ago having a conversation with a Catholic Priest who had spent time in Japan. He related a story that I believe sums up the character of the Japanese people when it comes to honor. One of the priests parishioners told him that his son, a young man employed by a local bank, had been caught dipping his hand in the till and taking some samples home. When he was caught the bank did not fire him or notify the police. Instead officials from the bank met with the son and his family and confronted them with the problem. To avoid dishonor to the bank and the family they retained the errant son and hired a person to watch him so he would not repeat he offense. We call this saving face, the Japanese call it honor.

It is natural to compare the behavior of the Japanese with that of the citizens of New Orleans during hurricane Katrina in 2005. We all saw the looting and trashing of the Superdome during and after the hurricane. Many Americans were appalled at the behavior of the citizens and officials of New Orleans and wondered why when so many people were willing to help them the victims of the storm were acting so badly.

This got me thinking so in searching the Internet for an article or two on this issue I came across a piece written by Reverend Jesse Lee Petersen. Rev. Petersen is a black conservative minister who founded the Brotherhood Organization of a New Destiny (BOND). Rev. Petersen is frequently seen on major TV networks such as Fox, CNN, and MSNBC, consistently leaving his liberal counterpart in knots. His unflappable, can-do attitude and absolute commitment to truth are the perfect medicine for a value-challenged society.

Shortly after Hurricane Katrina Rev. Petersen wrote the following piece that has been circulating around cyber space for a few years I have verified the column the wrote called “Moral Poverty” on Snopes.com and found it to be factual. Rev. Petersen writes: “Say a hurricane is about to destroy the city you live in. Two questions: What would you do? What would you do if you were black?

Sadly, the two questions don't have the same answer. To the first: Most of us would take our families out of that city quickly to protect them from danger. Then, able-bodied men would return to help others in need, as wives and others cared for children, elderly, infirm and the like.

For better or worse, Hurricane Katrina has told us the answer to the second question. If you're black and a hurricane is about to destroy your city, you'll probably wait for the government to save you.

This was not always the case. Prior to 40 years ago, such a pathetic performance by the black community in a time of crisis would have been inconceivable. The first response would have come from black men. They would take care of their families, bring them to safety, and then help the rest of the community. Then local government would come in.

No longer. When 75 percent of New Orleans residents had left the city, it was primarily immoral, welfare-pampered blacks that stayed behind and waited for the government to bail them out. This, as we know, did not turn out good results.

Enter Jesse Jackson and Louis Farrakhan. Jackson and Farrakhan laid blame on 'racist' President Bush. Farrakhan actually proposed the idea that the government blew up a levee so as to kill blacks and save whites.

The two demanded massive governmental spending to rebuild New Orleans, above and beyond the federal government's proposed $60 billion. Not only that, these two were positioning themselves as the gatekeepers to supervise the dispersion of funds. Perfect: 'Two of the most dishonest elite blacks in America,' overseeing billions of dollars. I wonder where that money will end up.

Of course, if these two were really serious about laying blame on government, they should blame the local one. Responsibility to perform legally and practically fell first on the mayor of New Orleans. We are now all familiar with Mayor Ray Nagin the black who likes to yell at President Bush for failing to do Nagin's job. The facts unfortunately do not support Nagin's wailing. As the Washington Times puts it, 'recent reports show [Nagin] failed to follow through on his own city's emergency-response plan, which acknowledged that thousands of the city's poorest residents would have no way to evacuate the city.'

One wonders how there was 'no way' for these people to evacuate the city. We have photographic evidence telling us otherwise. You've probably seen it by now the photo showing 2,000 parked school buses, unused and underwater. How much planning does it require to put people on a bus and leave town, Mayor Nagin?

Instead of doing the obvious, Mayor Nagin (with no positive contribution from Gov. Kathleen Blanco, the other major leader vested with responsibility to address the hurricane disaster) loaded remaining New Orleans residents into the Superdome and the city's convention center. We know how that plan turned out.

About five years ago, in a debate before the National Association of Black Journalists, I stated that if whites were to just leave the United States and let blacks run the country, they would turn America into a ghetto within 10 years. The audience, shall we say, disagreed with me strongly.

Now I have to disagree with me. I gave blacks too much credit. It took a mere three days for blacks to turn the Superdome and the convention center into ghettos, rampant with theft, rape and murder.

President Bush is not to blame for the rampant immorality of blacks. Had New Orleans' black community taken action, most would have been out of harm's way. But most were too lazy, immoral and trifling to do anything productive for themselves.

All Americans must tell blacks this truth. It was blacks' moral poverty, not their material poverty that cost them dearly in New Orleans. Farrakhan, Jackson, and other race hustlers are to be repudiated for they will only perpetuate this problem by stirring up hatred and applauding moral corruption.

New Orleans, to the extent it is to be rebuilt, should be remade into a dependency-free, morally strong city where corruption is opposed and success is applauded. Blacks are obligated to help themselves and not depend on the government to care for them. We are all obligated to tell them so.

With the fear of being labeled a racist, which is common today for anyone disagreeing with the likes of Jackson and Sharpton, I can state that I believe Rev. Petersen’s remarks are right on target. His comments not only pertain to blacks, to the many of the whites who remained in New Orleans.

I have written about the plight of our major urban centers like Detroit, Cleveland, Philadelphia and Chicago and how these cities have decayed under 30 or 40 years of Democratic leadership, or lack thereof. The Democrat politicians have made careers out of pimping themselves to the blacks of the inner cities to get their votes by promising them and an easy way out of poverty through government handouts.

There have not been many black leaders who are willing to tell blacks in he inner cities what they have to do on order to climb out of the deplorable conditions they live in. When they do they are out shouted by the left-wing liberals who still believe that cure can come for using other people’s money.

When you look at a city like Detroit and a city like Hiroshima you can see the dramatic difference between Japanese and American culture and the way he tackle the problems of the cites. 65 years ago Hiroshima was devastated by an atomic bomb and Detroit was a thriving industrial American metropolis. Today the two cities have reversed their status. It is Hiroshima that is a thriving, vibrant city while Detroit has fallen prey to political corruption, crime, welfare and moral and physical decay. Click here to read more on these two cities.

I am sure Japan will recover from the quake and tsunami. They will mourn their dead and rebuild their roads, houses, buildings and infrastructure. They will build new nuclear reactors and better sea walls. They will do this with a national will based on honor and cooperation. As for Detroit unless we can make massive changes in our thinking and demand honesty from the elected politicians and get rid of the pimping left-wing elites who can only demand more money and power the city will resemble a set from one of those futuristic Mad Max movies.

Rev. Petersen is the author of “Scam”: How the Black Leadership Exploits Black America.

Why the Left Hates Black Conservatives

Liberty cannot be preserved without general knowledge among the people." — John Adams

Lately we have seen a great deal of vitriol from the left directed at Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife. Much of this hatred stems from the black community. They seem to think he is some kind of “uncle tom” because he is a conservative. Congressmen like the uber liberal Anthony Wiener of New York are demanding Thomas recuse himself from certain cases pending or might be coming to the Supreme Court.

They claim that because he and fellow Associate Justice Antonin Scalia have attended a conference in San Francisco sponsored by the Heritage Foundation where speakers like Rush Limbaugh and David and Charles Koch were in attendance. They also do not like Thomas because his wife, Virginia, is a consultant to the Heritage Foundation and active in the Tea Party. She is also white.

These left wing attackers seem to overlook the political activities of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whose husband Martin was an internationally prominent tax lawyer and lobbyist. Or for her comments when asked why she refused to attend the annual “Red Mass” at the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle in Washington, D.C. when she said: "I went one year, and I will never go again, because this sermon was outrageously anti-abortion,” Does this mean she has a predisposed position on abortion and should recuse herself from cases appearing before the Court.

How about newly appointed Justice Elena Kagen who during her time as Solicitor General, she prepared a brief defending a law later ruled unconstitutional that would have criminalized depictions of animal cruelty or during her solicitor general confirmation hearing, she said that "there is no federal constitutional right to same-sex marriage." Also when asked during her confirmation hearings when asked about the Defense of Marriage act she replied: “she would defend the act if "there was any reasonable basis to do so.” If every Justice had to recuse themselves for comments they or their family members made we would have no Court. Just look at Justice Hugo Black, that bastion liberalism appointed by Franklin Roosevelt, who was a member of the KKK and fiercely anti-Catholic.

Thomas, like David Web, Allen West, Deneen Borelli, Joe Hicks, Sonja Schmidt, Star Parker, Larry Elder, Herman Cain and many others, are hated by the left because they will not conform to the victim mentality fostered by black politicians and street organizers like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. They just will not buy into their agenda and will speak to reality of why blacks are still in liberal serfdom.

One of my favorite black Tea Party conservatives is Deneen Borelli. Deneen Borelli is a Fellow with Project 21, a network of black conservatives which is an initiative of The National Center for Public Policy Research, a national public policy group based in Washington, D.C.

In her role, Deneen promotes the importance of personal responsibility and the benefits of free market policies as a means for social advancement. She advances these values by writing commentaries and participating in media interviews.

Deneen currently serves as an official contributor on the Fox News Channel programs and has appeared on FNC programs such as "Glenn Beck," "Your World with Neil Cavuto," "Hannity" and "Fox and Friends." Deneen has also appeared on MSNBC, CNN, the BBC and C-SPAN. Deneen is a columnist with The Daily Caller, and her commentaries on the importance of freedom and limited government have been published by newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, Chicago Tribune, Sacramento Bee, Baltimore Sun, Washington Examiner and Washington Times. She has also been a frequent speaker at political rallies and events, including the FreedomWorks 9.12 March on D.C. that drew a crowd estimated at over 800,000 people. Here are a few video clips of Borelli being interviewed on various FNC shows.

Deneen points out to FNC host Jamie Colby why Gov. Walker is following a mandate from the voters

n the FNC show “Justice with Judge Jeanine Pirro,” Deneen said the protests in Madison against Governor Walker and his plan to reform collective bargaining in light of the budget crisis are “an assault on the taxpayers of Wisconsin.

Deneen debates liberal political strategist Christopher Hahn on the Wisconsin protests, with “Fox and Friends” host Clayton Moore serving as the moderator.

I spent over an hour researching (on Google) the black conservatives I show above. I found some biographical information, but I also found some of the most scurrilous, racist and obscene sites and comments directed at them. I will not refer to these sites as they do not deserve any attention, however, I will link one such site referring to Deneen Borelli so you can see how ignorant and hateful the left is when there is someone who does not agree with them.

This particular site not only attacks her politics but her appearance. It claims her publicity picture was altered using Photoshop to make her look less black. I can tell you as a professional photographer everyone wants to look good in their professional headshot. I recently photographed an event for a black couple. The woman made a special request of me to reduce and shine on her face and to tone down the saturation of her skin. This is not unusual. Also, wen taking candid snapshots the lighting is nowhere near as favorable as when doing publicity headshots. This makes a very big difference.

As I stated above the left can’t tolerate black conservatives. Even he comedian and left leaning Bill Cosby is attacked by the left when he criticizes inner-city blacks for their lack of responsibility in education and parenthood. I can recall one such instance where Cosby was being interviewed by Tavis Smiley on his PBS show. Smiley, a left wing commentator on PBS and NPR, was challenging Cosby on his comments regarding the condition of inner-city blacks and bemoaning the fact that they were locked into a vicious cycle of poverty. Cosby paused a few seconds and then replied “50% dropout rate.” Smiley was speechless. You see Cosby did not go into the usual mantra of not enough government money or racism. He, instead, focused the responsibility on the individual — something the black liberals and street organizers do not like.

Every one of the black conservatives I have mentioned, including the left wing Juan Williams of FNC, have said the same about blacks and their condition in the inner cities of America. They blame the lack of responsibility on the part of the blacks for their plight. They claim the lack of even a basic high school education, children having children having more children with absent fathers, a culture of victimization and dependency on government for their sustenance is the reason. In essence this is nothing less than a form of serfdom promulgated by Democrat politicians so they can maintain their political power. Some cities such as Detroit and Cleveland have had Democratic lead municipal governments for over 40 years and the results have been disastrous.

They claim big government is not the answer and has never been the answer. Every government imposed solution, using taxpayer money; from public housing to community organizing has failed. And let us not forget the role of the teachers unions in the deplorable state of the inner city schools and education.

With the rise of the Tea Party movement more and more black conservatives are being heard. Allen West was elected to Congress and Herman Cain is exploring a presidential run. These black conservatives represent promise for a better life for the inner city blacks, a promise that will never come to fruition from the left.

Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette — Alive at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue

“Let them eat broccoli.” — Michelle Obama

It only took a few hours for President Obama to jump into the middle of the Wisconsin budget debate. He was quick to defend his labor union supporters by saying public sector workers are our neighbors. On the other hand it took him days to develop a clear message on Egypt and he still hasn’t made a clear and definitive statement on the revolution going on Libya. So what is our president and his queen been doing these past few days while the Middle East is turning upside down and the states are dealing with union protests as they try to balance their budgets? Well he is partying down at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

The President has done nothing about the crisis in Libya except give a press conference in which he called the situation “unacceptable,” then proceeded to accept it. He’s holding consultations about having meetings to design a committee that could help the world “speak with one voice to the government and the people of Libya,” a move that will doubtless be appreciated by anyone who survives Qaddafi’s Last Stand. Americans trying to escape the Libyan civil war were left stranded on a chartered ferryboat that was too small to handle the Mediterranean Sea while the French, Italians, Chinese, and other nations were able to get their citizens out of Libya.

Not a word has been uttered from the White House to condemn the fugitive Democrats who acted to shut down democracy in Wisconsin and Indiana. Widespread violence and hatred from union foot soldiers has gone unremarked.

The pirates of Somalia sail through the Indian Ocean and Gulf of Aden with confidence after slaughtering four innocent Americans. Middle Eastern unrest is poised to blow the price of oil into the stratosphere, a death blow to the economy Obama has already crippled, since he has moved forcefully to make us wholly dependent on foreign oil, while Obama cronies — including George Soros, who is what the Left likes to fantasize the Koch Brothers are — stand to make billions from useless “green energy” boondoggles.

His hapless Secretary of Homeland Security gapes in wonder as Americans are murdered on the southern border, while a young Saudi national is caught on the verge of deploying weapons of mass destruction. The nation teeters on the edge of ruin, and the President responds by submitting an absurd dead-on-arrival budget that increases federal spending.

Where is President Obama during all this? He’s enjoying the sounds of Motown at a star-studded White House event.

As the Associated Press reports, “The White House reverberated like a long-ago basement sound studio in Detroit on Thursday as the likes of John Legend, Seal, Jamie Foxx, Nick Jonas and Sheryl Crow channeled their inner Motown before Michelle and Barack Obama.” Other performers at this grand affair included Natasha Bedingfield, Smokey Robinson, Jordin Sparks, and Stevie Wonder. If you were not in attendance, don’t worry — you can watch the whole thing next Tuesday, on taxpayer-subsidized PBS.

To emphasize the historic importance of this White House concert, the President declared, “At concerts in the South, Motown groups literally brought people together — insisting that the ropes traditionally used to separate black and white audience members be taken down.” Back here in 2011, Obama’s loyal union supporters are howling racist, sexist, and homophobic insults into the faces of all who dare oppose them, and the President is utterly silent. So much for civility.

First Lady Michelle Obama got back from her lavish President’s Day ski retreat in Vail just in time to enjoy the concert. “As Motown rose, so did the forces of change in this country,” she declared. “During that time, it was the time of King and Kennedy, it was a time of marches and rallies and groundbreaking civil rights laws.” How many of those groundbreaking laws were passed by cowardly legislators who fled their states to avoid tough votes?

Presidents host big parties at the White House all the time. No one would begrudge Obama a bit of ceremonial elegance if he wasn't completely MIA during major crises. The sounds of Motown are indeed sweet, and historic, but last night they vanished into a howling void of leadership. Even the Supremes could do a better job than the anointed one.

Savor the bitter irony of the President taking the night off in the midst of national and global crises, many of his own making, to enjoy the music of a city that has been utterly destroyed by fifty years of his Party’s governance.

50 years of Democratic party leadership in Detroit

At least we know there was nobody in the Oval Office doing anything important that might have been disrupted by all the noise. If there were just let them eat cake.

65 Years Latter

Anyone who doesn't take truth seriously in small matters cannot be trusted in large ones either.” — Albert Einstein

Yesterday a friend of mine sent one of those viral emails that seem to go round and round. This one was entitled “65 Years Latter.” The photos imbedded in the email showed Hiroshima in 1945 after the Atomic Bomb had destroyed the city. Then it showed a series of photos of Hiroshima today with its brilliant neon lights and tall buildings — a real modern metropolis. The third set of photos showed Detroit as it exists today with its abandoned buildings and decaying infrastructure. The photos do not lie, but the context is misleading. The first photo shown below is of Hiroshima, August 1945. The second is Hiroshima today and the third is of Detroit today – 65 years later.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I sent this email to a few friends as an illustration of our decaying cities. One friend replied that he was disturbed at the lack of context in which the photos were displayed Evidently he has a Belgian neighbor who continually bad mouths the United States and claims that Europe should be our guiding light. I cannot or will not address this Belgians prejudice and will only say that planes leave for Europe every day.

After reading my friends comments I began to reflect on the email and its message and I too took issue with it. Here is my view of the message in the email.

First of all I don’t think the email is meant to reflect a superiority of the Japanese. After all we put a great deal of money into rebuilding Japan after WWII. I see it more of a comparison of what we do with the money. We have poured billions into cities like Detroit for the past 50 years. We have built public housing that turned to slums soon after he were opened. We have supported generation after generation with welfare and aid to dependent children only to create more dependent children — mothers having babies out of wedlock and their children and grandchildren doing the same. In essence we have promoted economic serfdom in the urban inner cities with our misguided giveaway policies. All to make liberals and bleeding hearts feel good. We have poured billions down the public education rat hole with declining results. This is what I see in photos.

My friend’s Belgian neighbor is wrong about Europe. We gave them billions under the Marshal Plan and paid for their national defense for the past 65 years through NATO. They too have a welfare system that is going broke. He has no right to brag about anything. We saved Europe in two world wars and then rebuilt the continent and defended them against soviet aggression for 65 years. They are nothing more than client states. Their day of reckoning is upon them. Their multiculturalism, social spending and selfishness are beginning to pay them unwanted and unplanned dividends — all bad.

The Japanese on the other hand took what we gave them and turned it into a plus. They rebuilt their industries, their cities and their society. Every dollar they spent was with practical purpose. They educate their children better than we do and they are not a multicultural society — in fact they are a racist society. I have been to Japan. And most of Europe is racist to some extent. When you scratch the liberal surface skin of a German, Frenchman or Belgian the racist nature of their society will begin to bled through. I have experienced it. (The photo at the left is of he graffiti stained memorial to the Marshal Plan in Frankfurt, Germany)

Let us not forget that once we were a nation like Japan is today. We had Free enterprise, an entrepreneurial spirit and small, unrestrictive government. We built a world class Interstate Highway System where Americans could travel the country with ease and good could be shipped quickly and cheaply. We built a nation where two-thirds of Americans owned their homes with a yard, a garage, car and a picket fence. Very few Japanese or Belgians have the same. In fact my friend’s Belgian neighbor lives in such a house, something you won’t find in Brussels, Liège or Antwerp. We had farms that feed the world and a great manufacturing base. Our R&D was second to none, after all it was our Atomic Bomb that ended WWII and probably saved millions of lives — American, Japanese, British and Russian.

Our problems developed not from the American spirit, but from years of Democratic control of big city governments. Their policies of prostituting themselves to public sector unions and the recipient class so they could maintain their power drove these cities into virtual bankruptcy

Japan and Belgium are not saddled with 18 million illegal aliens who are draining our economy. Their cost to the city of Los Angeles alone is $600 million per year. We have an unsecured border and an immigration policy that is not enforced. No European nation or Japan has such an immigration policy. If you don’t believe me just try to walk into any European county and set up residence. It won’t happen.

Our education system, which used to be second to none, has fallen to that of a developing country. We have schools that are more concerned with security and teachers more concerned with their collective bargaining rights than teaching. We have a union driven tenure system that allows bad and lazy teachers to continue while the good ones have to stand by a keep their mouths shut. They are forced to join unions that collect hundreds of millions of dollars in dues and then use that money to finance the campaigns of Democratic candidates who continue the death spiral of the cities and states where they have power. Japan and Belgium do not have teachers unions to degrade their education systems. Teachers are respected for the professionals they are, not the union tradesmen and women they have become in his nation.

One more thing to remember in this comparison is the millions of Americans who were killed and maimed fighting a war so Japan and Europe could be free and prosperous.