The Truth About Occupy Wall Street: FREE, FULL EPISODE: GBTV

Glenn Beck graciously made yesterday's GBTV episode, which gives us the full enchilada, the truth about Occupy Wall Street.

It's pretty self-explanatory, so here it is:

FREE, FULL EPISODE: GBTV: The Truth About Occupy Wall Street Discussion Link

Barack Obama Led #OccupyChicago – Circa 1988

Obama at anti-war protest, 2002 (Source: Verum Serum)

Just twenty or so years ago, Barack Obama wouldn’t just have supported the Occupy protests.

He would have organized them.

From Stanley Kurtz’s essential Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism, pp. 117-8:

In fact, Obama personally helped plan one of UNO’s most confrontational actions of the eighties [in 1988]: a break-in meant to intimidate a coalition of local business and neighborhood leaders into dropping a landfill expansion deal.

We know of Obama’s involvement in this demonstration only because his supporters in 2008 felt it necessary to rebut charges that, contrary to his claims of inter-racial healing, he had organized exclusively with blacks. Only then did Obama’s former colleagues from UNO [United Neighborhood Organization, a largely Mexican group] of Chicago reveal that he had helped to plan and lead this multi-ethnic demonstration against landfill expansion on Chicago’s South Side.

…Shouting “No deals!” somewhere between eighty and a hundred UNO-DCP [Developing Communities Project, a black group organized by Obama] marched to a local bank. There they broke into a meeting being conducted by the bank president and local community leaders. The group was exploring the possibility of a deal with Waste Management. The protestors, presumably including Obama, surrounded the meeting table while [Mary-Ellen] Montes [of UNO] told the negotiators, “We will fight you every step of the way.”

Obama was also likely involved with other aggressive UNO protests, including protests for school reform, through which he likely met former Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers. Ayers is involved in the Occupy protests today.

In the 1990s, Obama maintained his ties to radical activists, and “channel[ed] foundation funding to his confrontational Alinskyite colleagues.”

It’s clear that Obama’s ties to the Occupy movement–its forbears, its tactics, and some of its current luminaries–run deep.

This is what “community organizing” looks like.

By Joel Pollack at Big Government

The Ayers Brothers Connection: Coaching #OccupyChicago, Calling for School ‘Occupations’

Former Weather Underground terrorist leader, and long time colleague of president Barack Obama, Bill Ayers  is actively supporting the Occupy Wall Street movement, in his home town of Chicago – while his education activist brother Rick Ayers wants to see the movement extended to the nation’s schools.

In an October 16 interview with Chicago Sun-Times journalist Laura Washington, Bill Ayers described the” Occupy” movement as a “North American Spring,” akin to the “Arab Spring” still playing out in North Africa and the Middle East.

Said Ayers:

“These kinds of movements expand our consciousness of what’s possible…Every revolution seems impossible at the beginning, and after it happens, it was inevitable.”

Ayers’ support took a more practical form October 19, when the retired UIC professor led a “teach-in” with Occupy Chicago protesters on “ non-violent direct action” at the group’s  HQ (in front of the Federal Reseve Bank at Jackson and LaSalle).

Ayers  detailed the tactics and history of the Civil Rights movement, drawing analogies to the group before him. “You created power where there was none,” the famed agitator said.

Ayers spoke naturally to the crowd of 40, who sat in rapture, registering their approval by lifting silent fingers.

“It’s critical that you maintain your independence,” Ayers told the crowd – warning them not to be  co-opted by labor unions or the Democrats. History, Ayers told the assembled activists, shows his preferred approach to political power. “Martin Luther King didn’t go begging for a meeting with Lyndon Johnson,” Ayers said. “Lyndon Johnson begged for a meeting with Martin Luther King.”

The protesters seem to have already followed Ayers’ advice. The group turned down Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s proposition for a meeting, demanding the misdemeanor charges from last Saturday’s arrest of more than 170 activists be dropped first.

Writing from San Francisco, Bill Ayer’s brother Rick, a Professor in Teacher Education at the University of San Francisco, has called for the “Occupy” movement to reach into America’s schools.

Rick Ayers, an activist in his own right and a long time collaborator with his brother Bill in the Rethinking Schools movement, wants to see the OWS tactics “applied to schools”.

Writing in the Huffington Post, Rick Ayers praised OWS for its militancy:

“Occupy wall Street  is action. We have had talk, talk, talk for years, decades even. The right — the think tanks, big media outlets, politicians, foundations — thunders its dogma on a regular basis. The left – community organizers, unions, educators, activists — refute their arguments, though with a much smaller voice and very few dollars. But it has all just been a conversation.

Now action obliterates the deadlock. Whatever we have been waiting for — Obama, common sense, karma — we realized it was never coming to help us and it is time for action. Action creates facts, and facts are essential — they create possibilities and new words, fresh vocabularies. The silenced majority, the 99%, has finally been pushed so far that it is pushing back. Every movement is improbable until it happens; after the fact it so clearly was inevitable.”

Rick Ayers went on to say:

The same type of bold action could be applied to schools. The privatizers, those who would strip down our schools to being test-prep factories training only for compliance and passivity, have made their case with all the volume that billions of dollars can buy…

But so far it has only been a conversation. It does not matter if we defeat their arguments over and over. They still have the purse strings, the foundations, and the big megaphone. The time has come for action. Take over these schools. Occupy them. Sit in. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. We built these schools with our taxes, our labor, our commitment to students and communities. They are not just playthings for overfed business dilettantes. Instead of taking marching orders from Wall Street, we need to take these schools and make them institutions of liberation.

With students, community members, and teachers in these buildings, imagine the possibilities. Poetry workshop in one room; free clinic in another; science lab in a third. Food production. Critical pedagogy class. Strategy meetings. A kind of education that embraces deep meaning, knowledge for people’s needs, and participatory democracy. Watch these young people step up. In a liberated space, the bored and resistant students in the back of the room will be transformed. You will see them taking responsibility for their education, demonstrate their desire for ethical action, for sacrifice for the common good, and for a future they can believe in.

Can we do this? At one site? At a hundred? You can be certain that this is a discussion popping up all over the country. This is the kind of action that would trump the endless, and ultimately losing, debate we have been locked in over the past years. We can’t talk our way out of the problems in education. But we can act, together, because another world is possible.”

Is the “Occupy” movement a passing phase that will wither when the first blasts of winter hit Chicago and New York and Milwaukee?  Or is this the beginning  a much more significant, and dangerous period of US history?

The involvement of veteran activists like the Ayers brothers indicates that this is no mere passing explosion of youthful anarchist outrage. The “mature”  left is backing OWS for a reason. They’ve been waiting for this for a long time. They knew it would come. After all, their Marxist creed tells them that revolution is inevitable. Its only a matter of time.

by Trevor Loudon at Big Government

Progressives, Islamists huddle at Justice Department

Top Justice Department officials convened a meeting Wednesday where invited Islamist advocates lobbied them for cutbacks in anti-terror funding, changes in agents’ training manuals, additional curbs on investigators and a legal declaration that U.S. citizens’ criticism of Islam constitutes racial discrimination.

The department’s “civil rights lawyers are top of the line — I say this with utter honesty — I know they can come up with a way” to redefine criticism as discrimination, said Sahar Aziz, a female, Egyptian-American lawyer.

“I’d be willing to give a shot at it,” said Aziz, who is a fellow at the Michigan-based Muslim advocacy group, the Institute for Social Policy & Understanding.

The audience of Islamist advocates and department officials included Tom Perez, who heads the department’s division of civil rights.

“We must continue to have the open and honest and critical dialogue that you saw in the robust debate,” Perez responded in an enthusiastic closing speech a few minutes after Aziz made her demands at the event.

“I sat here the entire time, taking notes,” Perez said. “I have some very concrete thoughts … in the aftermath of this.”

The meeting at George Washington University showcased the expanding alliance between American progressives and Islamists, said Andrew McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor in New York.

Progressives “are making these Islamist groups into the [political] representatives of Muslims in the United States,” he told The Daily Caller. That elevation of Islamists to a leadership role sidelines the majority of American Muslims who don’t want Islamist leaders, as well as American Muslims who are female or gay, he said.

McCarthy investigated and prosecuted Egyptian-born Imam Omar Abdel-Rahman, dubbed “the blind sheik,” for urging Muslims to kill New Yorkers. Abdel-Rahman was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1996.

Progressives ally with the Islamic lobby because “they think it will be a political voting bloc that will be reliably Democratic,” said Robert Spencer, an author and expert on Islam.

None of the Islamist advocates of civil rights officials in attendance, including Perez, objected to Aziz’s call for free-speech restrictions.

The event did not include Zuhdi Jasser, an Arizona Muslim, former naval officer and a co-founder of a coalition of modernist Muslim groups, the American Islamic Leadership Coalition. “The Islamist groups’ victimology feeds into the left’s propaganda that the right is anti-minority and anti-Muslim, so there’s a mutual political benefit there,” said Jasser, who clashes with Spencer over rival responses to the Islamist groups.

Nor did the conference include any influential critics, such as McCarthy and Spencer, who argue that Islamist terror attacks are partly motivated by Islamic texts. These texts include the Koran’s verse 9:5, which says “when the sacred months have passed away, then slay the idolaters wherever you find them.”

Aziz, however, used her invitation to argue that Americans’ fear of Islamists’ bombs has evolved into racism towards dark-skinned men.

The word “Muslim,” she said, “has become racialized. … I don’t accept this formalistic cop-out that this is all about religion.”

Aziz did not offer any evidence for her claim, which she said justifies the use of Title VI anti-discrimination laws against institutions and individuals who argue that Islamic texts spur Islamic violence.

This legal redefinition, she said, would also “take [federal] money away from local police departments and fusion centers who are spying on all of us.”

Aziz also argued against the commonplace police practice of informally talking with people in communities, including Muslim communities. “This has been a real problem with this outreach stuff,” she said. Muslims “are acting in good faith, and then they find their imams, who were going to outreach meetings, were being spied on,” she complained. “Some have been deported. Some have been prosecuted.”

In March, Afghan-born New York Imam Ahmad Wais Afzali was ordered deported after he admitted he lied to the FBI about warning a suspected Muslim terrorist that he was being investigated. That terrorist, Najibullah Zazi, admitted that he was planning to place bombs in the New York City subway. The imam learned about the investigation because he had offered to work with local police to help identify potential terrorists in his congregation.

“People are going in good faith” to talk with police, Aziz said. “They’re being very honest about what their grievances are. They’re telling the government, ‘This what we want you to do … [and] we want you not to spy on our community.’”

Dwight Holton, a Justice Department legal counsel based in Oregon, said the threat of criminal gangs or terror attacks justifies routine police contacts with locals. “When we go to a barber shop to talk to the community, we don’t tell them you can have a lawyer,” he said.

“You should,” Aziz immediately replied.

Aziz’s advocacy was supported by a second Islamist advocate, Islamic Society of North America president Mohamed Magid. He argued that “teaching people that all Muslims are a threat to the country… is against the law and the Constitution.”

Magid asked Perez to change the federal government’s rules governing terror investigations, for more private meetings with top justice department officials, for the reeducation of FBI agents, and for more people to oppose criticism of Islam, which he labelled “religious bigotry and hate.”

In 2009 the federal government named Magid’s organization an unindicted co-conspirator in the successful 2009 trial of three Muslims who smuggled $12 million to the Islamist terror group Hamas. Two of the smugglers received life sentences.

During his speech, Perez applauded the Islamist lobbyists for persuading government officials to end extra security checks on airline passengers from Nigeria and 12 Islamic countries. The checks were adopted in 2010 after a Nigerian Muslim tried to blow up a passenger aircraft on Christmas Day.

“What did we hear in the aftermath of that? We heard a lot of feedback from people in this room and from leaders across the country that we could be doing a better job [by ending the checks]… and a few month later, and thanks to you, we did just that,” Perez told the Islamist advocates.

McCarthy, the former prosecutor, said few people recognize the expanding alliance between progressives and Islamists.

Americans “don’t realize that Islamist ideology is collectivist and redistributionist, so it works seamlessly with the left,” he said.

“They disagree over gay rights and women’s rights, [but] on many big items they’re on the same page,” McCarthy added, citing Islamist groups’ support for the administration’s health sector law as an example.

Perez did not promise to meet any of the demands made by the Islamists, but he repeatedly promised extensive consultations and flattered the attendees, while speaking in a style that blended the cadences of an academic lecturer and a rural preacher. “There will be times where we have honest differences of opinion, but if we don’t talk and don’t actively listen and if we don’t reflect and recalibrate where necessary, then we won’t be doing our job, and you have our continuing commitment to that end,” Perez declared.

Progressives, including Holton and Perez, choose to ignore the Islamists’ stated goals, Spencer said. “They assume — and force us to assume on pain of charges of ‘Islamophobia’ — that all Muslims are moderate, peaceful and have no intentions of bringing Sharia [Islamic law] here,” said Spencer. “No amount of evidence to the contrary, no amount of jihadi plots, and no number of demands for accommodation of Sharia’s provisions, ever disabuses them of this dogma.”

Justice Department officials declined to comment to The Daily Caller.

When the session ended, Perez — a Maryland resident, a progressive and a former staffer to Sen. Ted Kennedy — climbed the stage to embrace Imam Magid, who was born in Sudan and trained at a Saudi fundamentalist seminary.

By Neil Munro

Originally Posted at the Daily Caller

Pelosi: Lawmakers Should Sacrifice Jobs for Health Care

(AP) House Speaker Pelosi says lawmakers aren't in Washington for job security but 'to do the job for the American people.'

Thursday: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, accompanied by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada and House Majority Whip James Clyburn of South Carolina, speaks with reporters outside the White House at the end of a health care summit with President Obama and Republicans held at Blair House. (AP Photo)

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi urged her colleagues to back a major overhaul of U.S. health care even if it threatens their political careers, a call to arms that underscores the issue's massive role in this election year.  


Lawmakers sometimes must enact policies that, even if unpopular at the moment, will help the public, Pelosi said in an interview being broadcast Sunday the ABC News program "This Week."


"We're not here just to self-perpetuate our service in Congress," she said. "We're here to do the job for the American people."  (Hmmm... this from a women who has held her congressional seat for over a quarter of a century and has reaped personal gain from favorable legislation for her husband's business interests.)


It took courage for Congress to pass Social Security and Medicare, which eventually became highly popular, she said, "and many of the same forces that were at work decades ago are at work again against this bill."

It's unclear whether Pelosi's remarks will embolden or chill dozens of moderate House Democrats who face withering criticisms of the health care proposal in visits with constituents and in national polls. Republican lawmaker unanimously oppose the health care proposals, and many GOP strategists believe voters will turn against Democrats in the November elections.

Pelosi, from San Francisco, is more liberal than scores of her Democratic colleagues. But she generally walks a careful line between urging them to back left-of-center policies and giving them a green light to buck party leaders to improve their re-election hopes.

Her comments to ABC, in the interview released Sunday, seemed to acknowledge the widely held view that Democrats will lose House seats this fall -- maybe a lot. They now control the chamber 255 to 178, with two vacancies. Pelosi stopped well short of suggesting Democrats could lose their majority, but she called on members of her party to make a bold move on health care with no prospects of GOP help.
"Time is up," she said. "We really have to go forth."

Her comments somewhat echoed those of President Obama, who said at the end of last week's bipartisan health care summit that Congress should act on the issue and let voters render their verdicts. "That's what elections are for," he said.

The White House says Obama, perhaps on Wednesday, will announce a "way forward" on health care. He, Pelosi, and Senate Democratic leaders have left little doubt that they hope to pass a Democratic-crafted bill under "budget reconciliation" rules that would bar Republican filibusters in the Senate. It's unclear whether Pelosi can muster the needed votes in the House.

White House officials say they will redouble efforts to remind voters that the Senate passed an Obama-backed health care bill in December, with a super majority of 60 votes. The new plan calls for the House to pass that bill and send it to Obama's desk, and then use Senate budget reconciliation rules to make several changes demanded by House Democrats.

Following a Republican victory in Massachusetts last month, Democrats now control 59 of the Senate's 100 seats, one vote short of the number needed to block GOP filibusters.

Pelosi told CNN that "in a matter of days" Democrats will have specific legislative language on health care to show to the public and to wavering lawmakers. She predicted voters will warm up to the bill once they understand its details.

"When we have a bill," she said, "you can bake the pie, you can sell the pie. But you have to have a pie to sell."

Obama and Democratic lawmakers say they may add several more Republican ideas to their legislative package, even if it's unlikely to attract a single GOP vote. One idea, by Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., would focus on battling waste and fraud in the medical system.

The main elements of the Democratic plan are known, and opposed by Republicans in Congress. It would insure about 30 million more Americans over 10 years with subsidies for the poor and a new requirement for nearly everyone to carry health insurance.

It would also bar some insurance company practices, such as denying coverage to people with medical problems. And it would establish government-run exchanges to help individuals and small businesses obtain insurance policies, although it would exclude the "public option" that many liberals wanted.

Fox Nation

Time to hit the phones and faxes tomorrow and let the House and Senate know that we have had enough.  Dump the anti-will of the American people ideology and vote no on ObamaCare once and for all.  Save the greatest healthcare system in the world and your children’s future.  Just Say NO… to the ideologues… Pelosi, Obama and Reid, and then vote then out!!  Tell the Queen we’ve had enough!!