There are many thoughtful plans being promoted that should the Republican Party regain control of the House of Representatives, they should pursue. These plans offer various degrees of remodeling the federal system but do nothing to alter its inexorable course toward either an Oligarchy or acting national democratic legislature.
I offer as a counterpoint this brief list of actions that would merely begin the process of “returning to the Constitution”. The list could easily number in the hundreds of pages and resemble one of the current Congress's legislative acts in both size and scope and even that wouldn’t completely “return us to the Constitution.”
With an open mind and with an even more hopeful heart I offer this brief set of actions that would only begin the “return” process and challenge my fellow citizens to consider the magnitude of what must be done to “secure the [former] blessing of liberty to ourselves AND our posterity.
This plan outlines a set of goals, questions and statements that you, the reader, can take to your local city council, mayor, representative or even just your neighbors to begin a discussion on how to return our country to the principles our Founding Fathers intended. This discussion is crucial as we approach mid-term elections in roughly two months because now is the opportunity to start turning around the country from the Socialist leanings that the Obama administration is preaching.
1. Freeze all federal hiring, this includes funding requests from the executive branch to hire.
2. Repeal the Budget Act of 1974 and all it’s contingent COLA “mandates” no matter the agency or program they are applicable to.
3. Freeze under threat of rescinding funding any and all new regulations currently under review or consideration
4. Have an up or down vote on a Declaration of War with Iraq and with Afghanistan. if either fails then troop withdrawals must begin immediately.
5. Pass the Private Property Restoration Act which among other things shall forbid any federal magistrate from hearing any cases to restrict use of private property.
6. Repeal the AMT permanently by statute.
7. Repeal the capital gains tax.
8. Refuse to fund the Education Department and the Department of Energy, any programs, grants projects or construction begun under these agencies must cease. The EPA’s charter must be rewritten to make it clear that it only has jurisdiction over federal and or territorial waters and land.
9. Repeal ObamaCare and all contingent legislation. Congress must then use legitimate Commerce Clause powers to “make commerce regular” and remove from the tax code all subsidies, all claims of tax credit, any and all restrictions federal law imposes on the sale or use of major medical health insurance. This must include federal recognition of PPO, HMO or other plans created to satisfy Congress.
10. Repeal the FICA and sunset the program by Jan 1, 2030. Establish a cutoff date for continued payment eligibility such as born on or before December 31, 1959.
11. Repeal the Patriot Act of 2001, 2005 and sunset the Department of Homeland Security on or before December 31, 2012.
12. Repeal all mandates, taxes and law pertaining to the SCHIP program.
13. Announce the return of U.S. Gold and Silver bullion coins as legal tender and order the treasury to begin the purchase of bullion with the intent of eliminating paper currency in favor of gold and silver coin and gold and silver coin backed notes.
14. Pass the Debt Consolidation and Repayment Act. This Act will require the sale of all lands currently “owned” by the U.S. government which do not house “needful buildings, docks, arsenals, forts and magazines”. This is not limited to “Parks” and “National forests”. All proceeds are to be solely applicable to the repayment of the U.S. Governments outstanding debts both domestic and foreign.
15. End the federal tax designations enacted and known as 501 (c), (g), 503, 527 e.g. “non-profits”.
16. Repeal the “Income tax witholding act” and enact an immediate and deduction free, flat income tax law, payable once per year by each citizen.
17. Repeal all corporate and business interest, income and profit taxation.
18. Heed the call of 38 states that shall call an convention to amend the Constitution under Article V of the U.S. Constitution.
Now you can fool yourself in believing that just electing republicans will correct the socialist path that our country is on, but trust me you are mistaken because there is nothing in our history to prove that once the government has grabbed more liberty crushing power they will never relent it!
To restore and uphold the sovereignty and rights of the individual States as guaranteed by the tenth amendment of the United States Constitution, which states, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Sunday, August 22, 2010
Why history and the past is very important...
Had a debate with a gentleman yesterday over the founding father, the original intention kick. And I was instructed that I should give up and stop my devotion, stop my promotion of this stupidity called “original intent,” that it doesn’t matter because we’ve made the – we don’t have original intent, and the law of the land is what the Supreme Court says it is. And I said, oh, that’s fantastic, that’s exactly what John Galt did in Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged.” Soon as the machine came in and said, hey, hey, this is the way it’s going to be, you guys are going to live under what the Council of Goodness and Wellness says you will, you’ll surrender this amount of your wealth, and you will go to work, and you will create this amount of wealth, and then we’ll take it from you. John Galt said, absolutely said that, and did the rest of the Galteans that lived in “Atlas Shrugged.” They all surrendered. We can’t go back to the way we were. This is the law of the land.
And as some of us try and insist on a daily basis, no, the way back through and out of this mess is to get back to the original understanding because it’s simpler, and it removes the ability for the federal tyrant and for the black-robed tyrant and for the tyrannical Congress and for the tyrannical EPA and for the tyrannical FDA and all the rest of them to do the things that they do to you and confiscate your property and redistribute your wealth and impoverish you and enslave your children. This is what is at stake. If you bail on the original intent, and you say it’s a worthless bygone time that we could never go back to, well, then you have sentenced your children to live under this tyranny forevermore. Good luck with that. And I hope you can sleep at night after you’ve made your peace with the Incorporation Doctrine and after you’ve made your peace with Leviathan consuming and crunching out trillions of dollars of manufactured money with your name printed on the debtor note. And all the other tyrannies that they hold over your head and bludgeon you and me, and then they’re going to bludgeon future generations with.
Is that what honorable free men do? We surrender what we know to be right, what we know once worked? This is what we do? That’s the coward’s way out.“Oh, but we’ve got to make our peace with incorporation, Chris, it’s the law of the land.” Well, the law of the land, then, is wrong. And if it was wrong, and it didn’t, and it was not embraced, should I say, when we embarked on this journey, well, then, it’s wrong today. Now, put that in your incorporationista pipe and smoke it. Of course, “But we want little government, Chris. We can get it another way.” Oh, you can? Really.
Walter Williams has a piece out today, “Will Republicans Save Us?” Let me answer that question, Dr. Williams. Uh, no.
By the way, telephone number for all you devotees of the New World Order and the new constitutional interpretation and the Incorporation Doctrine and the doctrine of surrender, please, tell me why you’ve surrendered. I’d love to hear from you. As a matter of fact, why don’t you defend your surrender? How about that?
“The 1994 elections” – wait, wait. “Democrat President Lyndon Johnson’s term of office saw massive increases in federal spending. When Johnson was elected into office in 1964, federal spending was $118 billion.” Oh, Lord, to have that today. 118 billion, man. You talk about federal nirvana. “When he left office in 1968, federal spending was a mere $178 billion, a 66 percent increase. Worse than the massive increase in federal spending, his administration and democratically controlled Congress saddled us with two programs that have helped fuel today’s federal disaster – Medicare and Medicaid.
“The 1994 elections gave Republican control of both the House and Senate. They held a majority for a decade. The 2000 election of George W. Bush as President gave Republicans what the Democrats have now, total control of the legislative and executive branches of government. When Bush came to office, federal spending was $1.788 trillion. When he left office, federal spending was $2.982 trillion. That’s a 60 percent increase in federal spending, closely matching the profligacy of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency.”
Don’t worry, though. When Newtie and Mittie and all the other gang, and Johnnie Boehner and all of them get back in there this time, “You just watch, Chris, they’re going to do it this time. They’re going to hold the line. These Republicans are real conservatives. They’ve seen the light. They’re with the Tea Party now, Chris. You need to get onboard.” [Chuckling]
“During the Republican control,” writes Dr. Walter Williams, “the nation was saddled with massive federal interference in education through No Child [Gets An Education Act]. ...[D]rug handouts became a part of the Republican-controlled Congress’s legacy. And it was during this interval that Congress accelerated its interference, assisted by the Federal Reserve Bank, in the housing market in the name of homeownership that produced much of the financial meltdown that [we] suffered in 2008.
“During the last two years, Democrats have amassed unprecedented growth of federal government power in the forms of bailouts, corporate takeovers, favors to their political allies and nationalization of our healthcare system. My question is how likely is it for Republicans to behave differently if they gain control? Their past behavior doesn’t make one confident that they will behave much differently, but I could be wrong.
“If Republicans win the House of [Representin’], there are measures they should take in their first month of office, and that is to undo most of what the democratically controlled Congress has done. If they don’t win a veto-proof Senate, they can’t undo ObamaCare, but the House alone can refuse to fund any part of it.”
Now, I’ve talked about this for months and months and months, ever since it became a possibility that Republicans could regain control of the House of Representin’. And it’s very simple here. “Well, Chris, they’re not going to have the power to repeal ObamaCare.” You’re right, they’re not going to have the power to repeal ObamaCare. But they hold the power of the purse!
And as some of us try and insist on a daily basis, no, the way back through and out of this mess is to get back to the original understanding because it’s simpler, and it removes the ability for the federal tyrant and for the black-robed tyrant and for the tyrannical Congress and for the tyrannical EPA and for the tyrannical FDA and all the rest of them to do the things that they do to you and confiscate your property and redistribute your wealth and impoverish you and enslave your children. This is what is at stake. If you bail on the original intent, and you say it’s a worthless bygone time that we could never go back to, well, then you have sentenced your children to live under this tyranny forevermore. Good luck with that. And I hope you can sleep at night after you’ve made your peace with the Incorporation Doctrine and after you’ve made your peace with Leviathan consuming and crunching out trillions of dollars of manufactured money with your name printed on the debtor note. And all the other tyrannies that they hold over your head and bludgeon you and me, and then they’re going to bludgeon future generations with.
Is that what honorable free men do? We surrender what we know to be right, what we know once worked? This is what we do? That’s the coward’s way out.“Oh, but we’ve got to make our peace with incorporation, Chris, it’s the law of the land.” Well, the law of the land, then, is wrong. And if it was wrong, and it didn’t, and it was not embraced, should I say, when we embarked on this journey, well, then, it’s wrong today. Now, put that in your incorporationista pipe and smoke it. Of course, “But we want little government, Chris. We can get it another way.” Oh, you can? Really.
Walter Williams has a piece out today, “Will Republicans Save Us?” Let me answer that question, Dr. Williams. Uh, no.
By the way, telephone number for all you devotees of the New World Order and the new constitutional interpretation and the Incorporation Doctrine and the doctrine of surrender, please, tell me why you’ve surrendered. I’d love to hear from you. As a matter of fact, why don’t you defend your surrender? How about that?
“The 1994 elections” – wait, wait. “Democrat President Lyndon Johnson’s term of office saw massive increases in federal spending. When Johnson was elected into office in 1964, federal spending was $118 billion.” Oh, Lord, to have that today. 118 billion, man. You talk about federal nirvana. “When he left office in 1968, federal spending was a mere $178 billion, a 66 percent increase. Worse than the massive increase in federal spending, his administration and democratically controlled Congress saddled us with two programs that have helped fuel today’s federal disaster – Medicare and Medicaid.
“The 1994 elections gave Republican control of both the House and Senate. They held a majority for a decade. The 2000 election of George W. Bush as President gave Republicans what the Democrats have now, total control of the legislative and executive branches of government. When Bush came to office, federal spending was $1.788 trillion. When he left office, federal spending was $2.982 trillion. That’s a 60 percent increase in federal spending, closely matching the profligacy of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency.”
Don’t worry, though. When Newtie and Mittie and all the other gang, and Johnnie Boehner and all of them get back in there this time, “You just watch, Chris, they’re going to do it this time. They’re going to hold the line. These Republicans are real conservatives. They’ve seen the light. They’re with the Tea Party now, Chris. You need to get onboard.” [Chuckling]
“During the Republican control,” writes Dr. Walter Williams, “the nation was saddled with massive federal interference in education through No Child [Gets An Education Act]. ...[D]rug handouts became a part of the Republican-controlled Congress’s legacy. And it was during this interval that Congress accelerated its interference, assisted by the Federal Reserve Bank, in the housing market in the name of homeownership that produced much of the financial meltdown that [we] suffered in 2008.
“During the last two years, Democrats have amassed unprecedented growth of federal government power in the forms of bailouts, corporate takeovers, favors to their political allies and nationalization of our healthcare system. My question is how likely is it for Republicans to behave differently if they gain control? Their past behavior doesn’t make one confident that they will behave much differently, but I could be wrong.
“If Republicans win the House of [Representin’], there are measures they should take in their first month of office, and that is to undo most of what the democratically controlled Congress has done. If they don’t win a veto-proof Senate, they can’t undo ObamaCare, but the House alone can refuse to fund any part of it.”
Now, I’ve talked about this for months and months and months, ever since it became a possibility that Republicans could regain control of the House of Representin’. And it’s very simple here. “Well, Chris, they’re not going to have the power to repeal ObamaCare.” You’re right, they’re not going to have the power to repeal ObamaCare. But they hold the power of the purse!
Friday, August 13, 2010
Hey libs you say we dont have any ideas for fixing this country, your the ones with no ideas!
This Conservative Plan for economic recovery is not painless by any stretch of the imagination. However, the country will ultimately rid itself of crippling debt and entitlements by adopting this approach.
The libs the ones that are responsible for this demise, in large part. And if they extricate themselves from what they have done and repeal and self-regulate themselves and get themselves disinvested from economic activity, well, then, yes, in their absence there will be economic growth.
So let’s go over this plan for economic growth...
One, Obama goes on TV next Tuesday night and announces a freeze in all federal hiring, in all departments. That includes the military.
Two, Obama announces that our affairs overseas have come to an inescapable conclusion, and that we are withdrawing all our forces from the NATO pacts. We’re withdrawing our forces from Okinawa and from Japan. We’re pulling out of Iraq and Afghanistan, and we’re downsizing the military and making it so that it’s only used to protect the American homeland. We’ll use the savings and the money to build the biggest missile shield in the history of Earth.
Three, after he has stopped all federal hiring at all levels, he then begins the process of attrition, just like what big companies do. If you’re a federal parasite, and you’ve been on the dole for 25, 30 years, and you still think you have 10 left, get an early buyout. Get them off the payroll. Pare the government down.
Four, begin the process of liquidating all public property that is owned by the federal government that is not a needful building, meaning that there are over 80,000 pieces of property that the federal government must pay rent on, must manage the debt on, and must maintain at some level. I know this because Senator Tom Coburn brought it to the floor of the Senate a year and a half ago. So you start selling that property. What do you use the money for? Pay the damn debt down.
Five, not only are you going to extend the Bush tax cuts, you’re going to send a bill to Congress or request the Congress to immediately, immediately cut the capital gains tax rate for the next decade to zero. No capital gains. It’s your money anyways.
And, four, the corporate tax rate needs to be lowered. Cut it down to 10 percent. So you cut the growth of government off. You have to forbid the EPA and the other agencies from writing any new regulations. None. “Chris, what about the environment? What about people’s food supply?” Tough. Manage it yourself. Tell your state, if they think they need to manage it, to hire a private firm to do it. It needs to end.
Now, if you did half of those things, you could at least stop the bleeding. The problem is, again – and this cannot be overstated or stated enough times. The problem is, once again, that too much capital, too much private capital has been consumed and is being consumed by that 7.5 trillion-headed Hydra monster known as Mordor on the Potomac. The problem in your state is that too much private capital is being consumed by your state government, which is why it shouldn’t bother you one iota that state bureaucrats are being laid off.
Oh, and one more thing here. And this nonsense about, oh, we’re going to start laying teachers off. Really? I dont care.....
We’re going to teach you taxpayers a lesson. How dare you say no new taxes? You know what we’re going to do to you? We’re going to take all the services that you like, like your precious little teachers and your precious little libraries, oh, and your police officers, and we’re going to get rid of them. That’s right. We’re going to start cutting them, and we’re going to make you pedestrian peasant plebian masses out there, we’re going to make you police yourselves. We’re going to make you put your own stupid fires out. Really mr maubama? How you like me now? We’re going to make you teach your own children. Really, I say go for it maubama.....
People should welcome these changes, welcome the opportunity to meet these challenges in their own communities without interference from the federal government and without the monkeying around of their business by state governments. That won’t happen, though. There’ll be town hall meetings, and people will cry and wring their hands, [sobbing] “Want my teachers back.” It’s understandable and to be expected.
All right. We have more economic news. “Freddie Mac is seeking a further government infusion of $1.8 billion after again suffering quarterly losses, the company said yesterday. Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, government-sponsored lenders that back about half of all U.S. ... loans” – half? Half? You want to try 90 percent? Try getting a mortgage now without Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, thanks to the Dodd-Frank crime family. “The latest cash infusion would bring to $64.1 billion the amount of aid received by the company based just outside Washington ... in McLean, Virginia.”
Why shouldn’t Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac be sent packing? Why should you as a taxpayer subsidize the mortgage of someone in a state far away from you? Why? Explain it to me. Why shouldn’t they be forced to liquidate, just like anyone else that has a horrible business plan and is losing ass loads of money? Why shouldn’t they have to sell their assets off, take their losses, and go under? You don’t think that someone would pick the ball up and would once again, if it were lucrative, and if it were profitable, begin the process of private lending for mortgages again? The fact that these guys are there, they’re preventing the bottoming out, which is going to happen anyways. We’re just delaying it, the bottoming out of the housing market, the biggest bubble ever erected or inflated in the history of the world.
Those of you that work in the construction business, you ought to be hoping that this happens. Your only chance you have of ever going back to work full-time and doing what you love, building homes and what have you, is to liquidate those overpriced properties, get them off the market, get people moving back into houses or renting them so that there will be a demand for new homes to be built at appropriate prices. It’ll never happen as long as the government is subsidizing the failure of tens of millions of mortgage owners, mortgage holders, many of whom aren’t even paying their notes.
I also say the states should nullify everything that the fed gov mandates, if the gov then tells the states that they will be cut off from road funds and school funds I say so be it cause its not their money to give in the first place, but if they want to play hard ball lets play.....i would tell chairman maubama that if they do that how about we (the states) just stop collecting their taxes, and i say come on maubama come on down and try to enforce your bullshit mandates!
Of course it would take a state legislature, gov, and attorney gen will some balls to finally stand up to maubama, and alas i fear that the states aren`t quite ready to do this....
Are you ready to do what must be done to take back this fine nation on gods green earth from the liberals, marxists, socialists and all enemies foriegn and domestic? Are you ready to participate in social disobedience, are you ready to call out obama and all his radical croonies????
Lets be clear about one thing, this will not be painless or easy, you have to be sure you want freedom and liberty......
So ask yourself, do you? Are you ready to return to a conservative way of life, a life of our founding fathers, and our founding document, a life of pride, sacrifice, and hard work???? Ask yourself that!
The libs the ones that are responsible for this demise, in large part. And if they extricate themselves from what they have done and repeal and self-regulate themselves and get themselves disinvested from economic activity, well, then, yes, in their absence there will be economic growth.
So let’s go over this plan for economic growth...
One, Obama goes on TV next Tuesday night and announces a freeze in all federal hiring, in all departments. That includes the military.
Two, Obama announces that our affairs overseas have come to an inescapable conclusion, and that we are withdrawing all our forces from the NATO pacts. We’re withdrawing our forces from Okinawa and from Japan. We’re pulling out of Iraq and Afghanistan, and we’re downsizing the military and making it so that it’s only used to protect the American homeland. We’ll use the savings and the money to build the biggest missile shield in the history of Earth.
Three, after he has stopped all federal hiring at all levels, he then begins the process of attrition, just like what big companies do. If you’re a federal parasite, and you’ve been on the dole for 25, 30 years, and you still think you have 10 left, get an early buyout. Get them off the payroll. Pare the government down.
Four, begin the process of liquidating all public property that is owned by the federal government that is not a needful building, meaning that there are over 80,000 pieces of property that the federal government must pay rent on, must manage the debt on, and must maintain at some level. I know this because Senator Tom Coburn brought it to the floor of the Senate a year and a half ago. So you start selling that property. What do you use the money for? Pay the damn debt down.
Five, not only are you going to extend the Bush tax cuts, you’re going to send a bill to Congress or request the Congress to immediately, immediately cut the capital gains tax rate for the next decade to zero. No capital gains. It’s your money anyways.
And, four, the corporate tax rate needs to be lowered. Cut it down to 10 percent. So you cut the growth of government off. You have to forbid the EPA and the other agencies from writing any new regulations. None. “Chris, what about the environment? What about people’s food supply?” Tough. Manage it yourself. Tell your state, if they think they need to manage it, to hire a private firm to do it. It needs to end.
Now, if you did half of those things, you could at least stop the bleeding. The problem is, again – and this cannot be overstated or stated enough times. The problem is, once again, that too much capital, too much private capital has been consumed and is being consumed by that 7.5 trillion-headed Hydra monster known as Mordor on the Potomac. The problem in your state is that too much private capital is being consumed by your state government, which is why it shouldn’t bother you one iota that state bureaucrats are being laid off.
Oh, and one more thing here. And this nonsense about, oh, we’re going to start laying teachers off. Really? I dont care.....
We’re going to teach you taxpayers a lesson. How dare you say no new taxes? You know what we’re going to do to you? We’re going to take all the services that you like, like your precious little teachers and your precious little libraries, oh, and your police officers, and we’re going to get rid of them. That’s right. We’re going to start cutting them, and we’re going to make you pedestrian peasant plebian masses out there, we’re going to make you police yourselves. We’re going to make you put your own stupid fires out. Really mr maubama? How you like me now? We’re going to make you teach your own children. Really, I say go for it maubama.....
People should welcome these changes, welcome the opportunity to meet these challenges in their own communities without interference from the federal government and without the monkeying around of their business by state governments. That won’t happen, though. There’ll be town hall meetings, and people will cry and wring their hands, [sobbing] “Want my teachers back.” It’s understandable and to be expected.
All right. We have more economic news. “Freddie Mac is seeking a further government infusion of $1.8 billion after again suffering quarterly losses, the company said yesterday. Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, government-sponsored lenders that back about half of all U.S. ... loans” – half? Half? You want to try 90 percent? Try getting a mortgage now without Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, thanks to the Dodd-Frank crime family. “The latest cash infusion would bring to $64.1 billion the amount of aid received by the company based just outside Washington ... in McLean, Virginia.”
Why shouldn’t Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac be sent packing? Why should you as a taxpayer subsidize the mortgage of someone in a state far away from you? Why? Explain it to me. Why shouldn’t they be forced to liquidate, just like anyone else that has a horrible business plan and is losing ass loads of money? Why shouldn’t they have to sell their assets off, take their losses, and go under? You don’t think that someone would pick the ball up and would once again, if it were lucrative, and if it were profitable, begin the process of private lending for mortgages again? The fact that these guys are there, they’re preventing the bottoming out, which is going to happen anyways. We’re just delaying it, the bottoming out of the housing market, the biggest bubble ever erected or inflated in the history of the world.
Those of you that work in the construction business, you ought to be hoping that this happens. Your only chance you have of ever going back to work full-time and doing what you love, building homes and what have you, is to liquidate those overpriced properties, get them off the market, get people moving back into houses or renting them so that there will be a demand for new homes to be built at appropriate prices. It’ll never happen as long as the government is subsidizing the failure of tens of millions of mortgage owners, mortgage holders, many of whom aren’t even paying their notes.
I also say the states should nullify everything that the fed gov mandates, if the gov then tells the states that they will be cut off from road funds and school funds I say so be it cause its not their money to give in the first place, but if they want to play hard ball lets play.....i would tell chairman maubama that if they do that how about we (the states) just stop collecting their taxes, and i say come on maubama come on down and try to enforce your bullshit mandates!
Of course it would take a state legislature, gov, and attorney gen will some balls to finally stand up to maubama, and alas i fear that the states aren`t quite ready to do this....
Are you ready to do what must be done to take back this fine nation on gods green earth from the liberals, marxists, socialists and all enemies foriegn and domestic? Are you ready to participate in social disobedience, are you ready to call out obama and all his radical croonies????
Lets be clear about one thing, this will not be painless or easy, you have to be sure you want freedom and liberty......
So ask yourself, do you? Are you ready to return to a conservative way of life, a life of our founding fathers, and our founding document, a life of pride, sacrifice, and hard work???? Ask yourself that!
Sunday, August 8, 2010
Ever hear the phrase that,"how do you know where your going, if you dont know where you came from"?
Now stick with me for a minute while I state my case as I explain who foner is and why he is important to this post.....
Eric Foner: Profile
By Jacob Laksin
DiscoverTheNetworks.org
May 24, 2005
Eric Foner is a neo-Marxist professor of history at Columbia University and one of America’s most prominent tenured radicals. A prolific author and lecturer, he is a former president of several professional historical associations, including the Organization of American Historians and the American Historical Association. He is also regarded as a leading expert on the Civil War and the Reconstruction period that followed it. A member of the editorial board of The Nation, and his extreme leftist politics have earned him the sobriquet “Eric the Red” among Columbia students.
In many ways, Foner’s radicalism is born of his background. Growing up in New York City in what he has described as a “Communist oriented” family, Foner has long cited his father, a Communist fellow-traveler, as an influence. In his books, Foner has striven to cast his father as a victim of anti-Communist hysteria. To this end, he has related the story of his father’s firing from the City College of New York, where he worked as a history professor, following a series of hearings by a state legislative committee into the clout of Communists in academia. For Foner, this story is illustrative of the unfair treatment suffered by Communist-sympathizers at the hands of “McCarthyite” censors. (Foner’s father understandably declined to testify before the hearings about his political preferences.) Missing from Foner’s account, however, is any mention of the fact that the hearings were coterminous with the years of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, when Communist hangers-on such as Foner’s father pushed the line that the free West, symbolized by America and Britain, posed a far greater threat to world peace than Stalin and his then-allies in Nazi Germany. Foner’s father was hardly the only Communist of his bloodline. Foner’s uncle was the Communist Party labor historian Philip Foner.
Eric Foner has carried on the radical tradition. An outspoken champion of the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 70s, he could not be swayed from his attachment by the USSR’s collapse. This was clearly demonstrated in the summer of 1994, when the leftwing magazine Dissent published an article by a lapsed Communist writer, Eugene Genovese. Titled “The Crimes of Communism: What Did You Know and When Did You Know It?” the article was critical of the Soviet Union’s supporters among the American left, charging them with a willful blindness to the crimes perpetrated by Communist regimes.
In an outraged rebuttal to Genovese’s article, which also appeared in Dissent, Foner attempted to justify the left’s “silence in the face of unspeakable crimes” commited by the Soviet Union. He praised the “communists’ contribution to some of the country’s most important struggles for social betterment.” For Foner, the noble ends justified the murderous means. He further asserted that Genovese’s “current outlook has far more in common with a long tradition of elitist antiliberalism, including Tory romanticism and Old South criticism of capitalism in the nineteenth century, and with various expressions of right-wing ideology in the twentieth.” But Genovese was guilty of a yet more baleful thought crime, according to Foner: He was no longer a reliable propogandist for the radical cause:
The principles he enumerates offer no guidance whatever to those desiring to rethink the history of socialism while retaining a commitment to social change. Had they prevailed throughout American history, there would have been no antislavery movement, no feminism, labor movement, or civil rights struggle.
Foner’s undying support for the Soviet Union found its most vivid expression in his 2002 book, a collection of previously published essays called Who Owns History? Rethinking the Past in a Changing World. In one of these essays, called “The Russians Write a New History,” Foner trained his ire at a new generation of Russian historians. What galled Foner, who worked as a visiting professor in Russia during the presidency of Mikhail Gorbachev, was that these historians dissented from Foner’s hagiographic view of the Soviet past; no longer serving as mere stenographers for Soviet propaganda, they “painted the history of the Soviet era in the blackest hues,” and cared little for the interpretive lexicon of “class” and “imperialism.” Worse, in Foner’s book, they looked with admiration to the United States. So much so, in fact, that Foner was moved to deride his Soviet students’ "love affair with America," and sought to disabuse them of their belief that "America has become the land of liberty and prosperity of our own imagination." Such a belief was unpardonably “one-dimensional,” Foner insisted, reminding his students that the U.S. “has its own complement of mistakes and crimes,” and cautioning them to take note of “America’s ills: poverty, homelessness, racism, unemployment.” With discernible dejection, Foner reported that his condemnations of America were not “greeted with enthusiasm.”
As an avid practitioner of the historicist school of scholarship, Foner has long concentrated on rewriting history in accordance with his radical politics. Yet he is not forthcoming about his patently political revisionism. In innumerable articles and lectures, he has presented his approach as “a candid appraisal of our own society’s strengths and weaknesses, not simply an exercise in self-celebration,” one that invites students of history to think “historically—not mythically” about the American past. But Foner presents only one side of the balance sheet. The history of the United States, he claims, is an unrelieved march of bigotry and oppression. Thus, he has claimed that slavery and racism “were embedded in the Constitution.” Likewise, the American ideals of “freedom” hold no allure to Foner. America, as he sees it, cannot be redeemed from its “debasement of millions of people into slavery and the dispossession of millions of native inhabitants of the Americas.” In Foner’s telling, modern America can scarcely be distinguished from its slave-owning past. In a 1995 editorial for The Nation, Foner impugned the “American residential apartheid” between blacks and whites, which he blamed on “the inequitable operation of a putatively free market.”
Foner’s contemptuous view of American history informs many of his classes—not least his course surveying the history of American radicalism, “The American Radical Tradition.” Because of his bleak reading of America’s past, Foner felt little sympathy for his native country in the wake of the September 11 attacks. Writing in the London Review of Books, he stated: “I’m not sure which is more frightening: the horror that engulfed New York City or the apocalyptic rhetoric emanating daily from the [Bush] White House.” (He also urged “[American] allies to impose some restraint on the White House.”) Moreover, Foner denounced America’s preemptive war against Iraq. Of the doctrine of preemption, Foner, in an interview with the Columbia Spectator, insisted that it “takes us back to the notion of the rule of the jungle,” and claimed that it was “exactly the same argument” used by the Japanese to justify the attack on Pearl Harbor. Nor was Foner prone to any doubts about the root causes of anti-Americanism around the globe. In a September 2004 article for the History News Network, he explained, “It is based primarily on American policies -- toward Israel, the Palestinians, oil supplies, the region’s corrupt and authoritarian regimes, and, most recently, Iraq.”
Similarly, Foner explained that “longtime allies in Europe” believe that “the war on terrorism is motivated in part by the desire to impose a Pax Americana in a grossly unequal world.” He did not altogether dismiss the notion that the U.S. might have a noble interest in championing democracy across the globe. “Nonetheless,” he wrote in an April 2003 op-ed for the New York Times, “other societies have their own historically developed definitions of freedom and ways of thinking about the social order, which may not exactly match ours. The unregulated free market, for example, can be profoundly destabilizing in societies organized on traditional lines of kinship, ethnicity or community.”
when Communist hangers-on such as Foner’s father pushed the line that the free West, symbolized by America and Britain, posed a far greater threat to world peace than Stalin and his then-allies in Nazi Germany. Foner’s father was hardly the only Communist of his bloodline. Foner’s uncle was the Communist Party labor historian Philip Foner.
Yesterday Ann Coulter wrote this: “The very author of the citizenship clause, Sen. Jacob Howard of Michigan, expressly said, ‘This will not’” – speaking of the Fourteenth Amendment – “‘This will not, of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers.’ In the 1884 case Elk v. Wilkins, the Supreme Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment did not even confer citizenship on Indians” – so Foner’s saying they were talking about Indians is incorrect, incorrect – “because they were subject to tribal jurisdiction, not U.S. jurisdiction.
“For a hundred years, that was how it stood,” writes Ann Coulter, “with only one case adding the caveat that children born to legal permanent residents of the U.S., gainfully employed, and who were not employed by a foreign government would also be deemed citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment. And then, out of the blue, in 1982, Justice Brennan slipped a footnote into his 5-4 opinion in Plyler v. Doe, asserting that ‘no plausible distinction with respect to Fourteenth Amendment “jurisdiction” can be drawn between resident aliens whose entry into the United States was lawful, and resident aliens whose entry was unlawful.’ (Other than the part about one being lawful and the other not.)
“Brennan’s authority for this lunatic statement was that it appeared in a 1912 book written by Clement L. Bouvé. (Yes, the Clement L. Bouvé – the one you’ve heard so much about over the years.)” Have you heard about Clement L. – no, nobody has. That’s her point. She’s making a joke. “Bouvé was not a senator, not an elected official, certainly not a judge – just some guy who wrote a book.
“So on one hand we have the history, the objective, the author’s intent and 100 years of history of the Fourteenth Amendment, which says that the Fourteenth Amendment does not confer citizenship on children born to illegal [aliens]. On the other hand, we have a random outburst by some guy named Clement – who, I’m guessing, was too cheap to hire an American housekeeper.”
So it just continues on, ladies and gentlemen. Now we have this argument here that is not an argument at all. And I wish to spend just a moment going over this, again, because I find myself in the position where some of my peers think that the history of this doesn’t matter. “Chris, what does this have to do with the future? Talk about today. People don’t want to hear about your stupid history lessons.” Well, it does matter. The original intent of that damn amendment is all that matters. What the ratifiers said that it meant is all that matters. When you cave in and say, “Ooh, ooh, well, we have a Supreme Court that says since 1992, ooh, hoo hoo,” that is what is irrelevant.
You must defend the original intent! This is absolute nonsense here with McCain and all these other guys running, “Well, we need an amendment to clarify.” No, we don’t. All we need to do is objectively support and obey the history of the Fourteenth Amendment and what the ratifiers said that it meant. And furthermore, how it was historically implemented!!
So I’m not going to back off the history. The history does matter. And if you don’t like the history, well, then, you should propose an amendment. But not Senator McCain’s amendment. You should propose the anyone that’s born here, they can sneak in by any means, doesn’t matter how they get here, if they pop a kid out here in the territory of a united state, then that kid is a citizen, end of story. But that is not what the Fourteenth Amendment says. So stop regurgitating the lie. It is a misstatement and distortion of American history, and I will not stand for it. And I certainly find it very objectionable and offensive that I am asked to move on. “C’mon, Chris you idiot, let’s deal with the future.” No. Our future is only our future when it relates to our past.
We have institutions for a reason. There is a reason why a Constitution is written. If you desire to amend it and change what it means, then you must pose an amendment. What Senator McCain and Gregg and Graham are droning on about is their ignorance of the Fourteenth Amendment, not their support of it. And all these people out there, “Oh, the Republicans are trying to do this to the Fourteenth Amendment,” this is all playing into the hands of the ruling class, the elitocrats. Let’s distract the people.
You ask yourself how in the hell things got this bad, simple, the marxists have been taking over our educational system and brainwashing our kids for damn near 50 years with their socialist agenda, did you people really believe that when you dump your kids in public schools for 12 hrs a day, 5 days a year, for 12 years that none of their american destroying, hating ways wouldn`t rub off??? Please, wake the hell up, the bottom line is that we did this to ourselves!
Eric Foner: Profile
By Jacob Laksin
DiscoverTheNetworks.org
May 24, 2005
Eric Foner is a neo-Marxist professor of history at Columbia University and one of America’s most prominent tenured radicals. A prolific author and lecturer, he is a former president of several professional historical associations, including the Organization of American Historians and the American Historical Association. He is also regarded as a leading expert on the Civil War and the Reconstruction period that followed it. A member of the editorial board of The Nation, and his extreme leftist politics have earned him the sobriquet “Eric the Red” among Columbia students.
In many ways, Foner’s radicalism is born of his background. Growing up in New York City in what he has described as a “Communist oriented” family, Foner has long cited his father, a Communist fellow-traveler, as an influence. In his books, Foner has striven to cast his father as a victim of anti-Communist hysteria. To this end, he has related the story of his father’s firing from the City College of New York, where he worked as a history professor, following a series of hearings by a state legislative committee into the clout of Communists in academia. For Foner, this story is illustrative of the unfair treatment suffered by Communist-sympathizers at the hands of “McCarthyite” censors. (Foner’s father understandably declined to testify before the hearings about his political preferences.) Missing from Foner’s account, however, is any mention of the fact that the hearings were coterminous with the years of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, when Communist hangers-on such as Foner’s father pushed the line that the free West, symbolized by America and Britain, posed a far greater threat to world peace than Stalin and his then-allies in Nazi Germany. Foner’s father was hardly the only Communist of his bloodline. Foner’s uncle was the Communist Party labor historian Philip Foner.
Eric Foner has carried on the radical tradition. An outspoken champion of the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 70s, he could not be swayed from his attachment by the USSR’s collapse. This was clearly demonstrated in the summer of 1994, when the leftwing magazine Dissent published an article by a lapsed Communist writer, Eugene Genovese. Titled “The Crimes of Communism: What Did You Know and When Did You Know It?” the article was critical of the Soviet Union’s supporters among the American left, charging them with a willful blindness to the crimes perpetrated by Communist regimes.
In an outraged rebuttal to Genovese’s article, which also appeared in Dissent, Foner attempted to justify the left’s “silence in the face of unspeakable crimes” commited by the Soviet Union. He praised the “communists’ contribution to some of the country’s most important struggles for social betterment.” For Foner, the noble ends justified the murderous means. He further asserted that Genovese’s “current outlook has far more in common with a long tradition of elitist antiliberalism, including Tory romanticism and Old South criticism of capitalism in the nineteenth century, and with various expressions of right-wing ideology in the twentieth.” But Genovese was guilty of a yet more baleful thought crime, according to Foner: He was no longer a reliable propogandist for the radical cause:
The principles he enumerates offer no guidance whatever to those desiring to rethink the history of socialism while retaining a commitment to social change. Had they prevailed throughout American history, there would have been no antislavery movement, no feminism, labor movement, or civil rights struggle.
Foner’s undying support for the Soviet Union found its most vivid expression in his 2002 book, a collection of previously published essays called Who Owns History? Rethinking the Past in a Changing World. In one of these essays, called “The Russians Write a New History,” Foner trained his ire at a new generation of Russian historians. What galled Foner, who worked as a visiting professor in Russia during the presidency of Mikhail Gorbachev, was that these historians dissented from Foner’s hagiographic view of the Soviet past; no longer serving as mere stenographers for Soviet propaganda, they “painted the history of the Soviet era in the blackest hues,” and cared little for the interpretive lexicon of “class” and “imperialism.” Worse, in Foner’s book, they looked with admiration to the United States. So much so, in fact, that Foner was moved to deride his Soviet students’ "love affair with America," and sought to disabuse them of their belief that "America has become the land of liberty and prosperity of our own imagination." Such a belief was unpardonably “one-dimensional,” Foner insisted, reminding his students that the U.S. “has its own complement of mistakes and crimes,” and cautioning them to take note of “America’s ills: poverty, homelessness, racism, unemployment.” With discernible dejection, Foner reported that his condemnations of America were not “greeted with enthusiasm.”
As an avid practitioner of the historicist school of scholarship, Foner has long concentrated on rewriting history in accordance with his radical politics. Yet he is not forthcoming about his patently political revisionism. In innumerable articles and lectures, he has presented his approach as “a candid appraisal of our own society’s strengths and weaknesses, not simply an exercise in self-celebration,” one that invites students of history to think “historically—not mythically” about the American past. But Foner presents only one side of the balance sheet. The history of the United States, he claims, is an unrelieved march of bigotry and oppression. Thus, he has claimed that slavery and racism “were embedded in the Constitution.” Likewise, the American ideals of “freedom” hold no allure to Foner. America, as he sees it, cannot be redeemed from its “debasement of millions of people into slavery and the dispossession of millions of native inhabitants of the Americas.” In Foner’s telling, modern America can scarcely be distinguished from its slave-owning past. In a 1995 editorial for The Nation, Foner impugned the “American residential apartheid” between blacks and whites, which he blamed on “the inequitable operation of a putatively free market.”
Foner’s contemptuous view of American history informs many of his classes—not least his course surveying the history of American radicalism, “The American Radical Tradition.” Because of his bleak reading of America’s past, Foner felt little sympathy for his native country in the wake of the September 11 attacks. Writing in the London Review of Books, he stated: “I’m not sure which is more frightening: the horror that engulfed New York City or the apocalyptic rhetoric emanating daily from the [Bush] White House.” (He also urged “[American] allies to impose some restraint on the White House.”) Moreover, Foner denounced America’s preemptive war against Iraq. Of the doctrine of preemption, Foner, in an interview with the Columbia Spectator, insisted that it “takes us back to the notion of the rule of the jungle,” and claimed that it was “exactly the same argument” used by the Japanese to justify the attack on Pearl Harbor. Nor was Foner prone to any doubts about the root causes of anti-Americanism around the globe. In a September 2004 article for the History News Network, he explained, “It is based primarily on American policies -- toward Israel, the Palestinians, oil supplies, the region’s corrupt and authoritarian regimes, and, most recently, Iraq.”
Similarly, Foner explained that “longtime allies in Europe” believe that “the war on terrorism is motivated in part by the desire to impose a Pax Americana in a grossly unequal world.” He did not altogether dismiss the notion that the U.S. might have a noble interest in championing democracy across the globe. “Nonetheless,” he wrote in an April 2003 op-ed for the New York Times, “other societies have their own historically developed definitions of freedom and ways of thinking about the social order, which may not exactly match ours. The unregulated free market, for example, can be profoundly destabilizing in societies organized on traditional lines of kinship, ethnicity or community.”
when Communist hangers-on such as Foner’s father pushed the line that the free West, symbolized by America and Britain, posed a far greater threat to world peace than Stalin and his then-allies in Nazi Germany. Foner’s father was hardly the only Communist of his bloodline. Foner’s uncle was the Communist Party labor historian Philip Foner.
Yesterday Ann Coulter wrote this: “The very author of the citizenship clause, Sen. Jacob Howard of Michigan, expressly said, ‘This will not’” – speaking of the Fourteenth Amendment – “‘This will not, of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers.’ In the 1884 case Elk v. Wilkins, the Supreme Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment did not even confer citizenship on Indians” – so Foner’s saying they were talking about Indians is incorrect, incorrect – “because they were subject to tribal jurisdiction, not U.S. jurisdiction.
“For a hundred years, that was how it stood,” writes Ann Coulter, “with only one case adding the caveat that children born to legal permanent residents of the U.S., gainfully employed, and who were not employed by a foreign government would also be deemed citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment. And then, out of the blue, in 1982, Justice Brennan slipped a footnote into his 5-4 opinion in Plyler v. Doe, asserting that ‘no plausible distinction with respect to Fourteenth Amendment “jurisdiction” can be drawn between resident aliens whose entry into the United States was lawful, and resident aliens whose entry was unlawful.’ (Other than the part about one being lawful and the other not.)
“Brennan’s authority for this lunatic statement was that it appeared in a 1912 book written by Clement L. Bouvé. (Yes, the Clement L. Bouvé – the one you’ve heard so much about over the years.)” Have you heard about Clement L. – no, nobody has. That’s her point. She’s making a joke. “Bouvé was not a senator, not an elected official, certainly not a judge – just some guy who wrote a book.
“So on one hand we have the history, the objective, the author’s intent and 100 years of history of the Fourteenth Amendment, which says that the Fourteenth Amendment does not confer citizenship on children born to illegal [aliens]. On the other hand, we have a random outburst by some guy named Clement – who, I’m guessing, was too cheap to hire an American housekeeper.”
So it just continues on, ladies and gentlemen. Now we have this argument here that is not an argument at all. And I wish to spend just a moment going over this, again, because I find myself in the position where some of my peers think that the history of this doesn’t matter. “Chris, what does this have to do with the future? Talk about today. People don’t want to hear about your stupid history lessons.” Well, it does matter. The original intent of that damn amendment is all that matters. What the ratifiers said that it meant is all that matters. When you cave in and say, “Ooh, ooh, well, we have a Supreme Court that says since 1992, ooh, hoo hoo,” that is what is irrelevant.
You must defend the original intent! This is absolute nonsense here with McCain and all these other guys running, “Well, we need an amendment to clarify.” No, we don’t. All we need to do is objectively support and obey the history of the Fourteenth Amendment and what the ratifiers said that it meant. And furthermore, how it was historically implemented!!
So I’m not going to back off the history. The history does matter. And if you don’t like the history, well, then, you should propose an amendment. But not Senator McCain’s amendment. You should propose the anyone that’s born here, they can sneak in by any means, doesn’t matter how they get here, if they pop a kid out here in the territory of a united state, then that kid is a citizen, end of story. But that is not what the Fourteenth Amendment says. So stop regurgitating the lie. It is a misstatement and distortion of American history, and I will not stand for it. And I certainly find it very objectionable and offensive that I am asked to move on. “C’mon, Chris you idiot, let’s deal with the future.” No. Our future is only our future when it relates to our past.
We have institutions for a reason. There is a reason why a Constitution is written. If you desire to amend it and change what it means, then you must pose an amendment. What Senator McCain and Gregg and Graham are droning on about is their ignorance of the Fourteenth Amendment, not their support of it. And all these people out there, “Oh, the Republicans are trying to do this to the Fourteenth Amendment,” this is all playing into the hands of the ruling class, the elitocrats. Let’s distract the people.
You ask yourself how in the hell things got this bad, simple, the marxists have been taking over our educational system and brainwashing our kids for damn near 50 years with their socialist agenda, did you people really believe that when you dump your kids in public schools for 12 hrs a day, 5 days a year, for 12 years that none of their american destroying, hating ways wouldn`t rub off??? Please, wake the hell up, the bottom line is that we did this to ourselves!
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