Fool Me Twice (20 page)

That is why—as we documented in
Red Army
—groups like the Alliance for American Manufacturing, a union-dominated organization, have played such a prominent role in helping to push for progressive Democrats' manufacturing legislation—including the Buy American provision. But, as we also wrote in
Red Army
, the whole AAM and progressive Democrats' plan for Make It in America and Buy American went up in smoke in May 2011,
when President Obama “inserted the new economic slogan,
Win the Future
, into the mix.”
⁸⁵
After the Democrats and their allies had invested a whole year pushing their Make It in America plan, Win the Future came along, only to be made the butt of many jokes ending with exclamations of
WTF?

Writing in
The Hill
, Russell Berman also pointed out the obvious fact that not much in the Democratic leadership's proposal was actually new, as it included a “raft of legislation party lawmakers have proposed in recent years.”
⁸⁶
But progressives have no choice other than to keep on pushing Buy American—by one name or another. The Democrats' campaign piggy bank depends on it.

A
S WITH MANY
“skillful politicians,” Barack Obama mostly conceals his true intentions and beliefs. But on occasion he makes them perfectly clear. In 2008, Obama's entire presidential campaign had been based on themes of national unity, of transcending partisan differences, on a “red, white, and blue America.” Once elected, the unifying Obama seemed to vanish. Overnight, his rhetoric radically changed.

“We're gonna punish our enemies and we're gonna reward our friends,” Obama told Latino voters in an interview aired on Spanish TV channel Univision, just a month before the landslide defeat of his political allies—the Reid-Pelosi Democrats—in November 2010.
¹
That one sentence “pretty much sums up” Obama's entire presidency, the Heritage Foundation's Conn Carroll later wrote for the
Washington Examiner.
²

One of the most deceptive tricks in Obama's rhetorical arsenal is his use of the term
economic fairness
. A prime example of the progressives' use, in general, of harmless-sounding rhetoric in their advancement of radical objectives, this “fairness” derives directly from the Marxist conception of
economic justice
. It is used today with great effect by the many shades of progressives—communists, socialists, Democratic socialists—all over the globe.

MIT economist Lester C. Thurow, who started his career working on President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society welfare programs—and later
helped found the socialist-progressive Economic Policy Institute—put it this way in 2003:

In addition to outlining the process whereby the system of capitalism would end, Marx went on to recommend a new system, communism, which would, he believed, eliminate the evils of capitalism. He never said much about the transformation of capitalism into communism, but in his vision of communism … it would create a new society where economic fairness and personal freedom reigned.
³

It would be a grave error, however, to mistake
Marx's personal freedom
as in any way similar to the kind of freedom from tyranny of government fought for by America's Founding Fathers and Mothers, who then enshrined it in the U.S. Constitution, a world-changing advance in human liberty and self-government. Marx's
personal freedom
would become possible only within the never-realized “higher phase” of communist society. Marx's
freedom
comes after “all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly.”

When the individual liberty of the Founders was transformed into the national interest of Teddy Roosevelt and the Progressives, we were only one generation away from a major threat to all our personal liberties. That threat still exists today.
⁴

So wrote Burton W. Folsom Jr., professor of history at Hillsdale College and senior historian at the Foundation for Economic Education, in October 2010.
⁵
Folsom was referring to the first President Roosevelt's August 31, 1910, “New Nationalism” speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, urging greater government control over the economy.
⁶

On December 6, 2011, Barack Obama—who well knows the history of the place—delivered his own speech in Osawatomie.
⁷
But Obama's speech contained no mention of the reason for his presidential predecessor's visit to Osawatomie—the commemoration of revolutionary abolitionist John Brown—for which Roosevelt had been invited to dedicate the John Brown Memorial Park. But neither Roosevelt nor Obama had come to Osawatomie
to right a great historic wrong, as had America's most famous, if also notorious, abolitionist.

On August 30, 1856, Brown led the Pottawatomie Massacre, in which five men were killed, at what was named Bleeding Kansas. Brown later led the unsuccessful takeover of the Federal munitions arsenal at Harper's Ferry (later West Virginia) in 1859. The Commonwealth of Virginia tried Brown for treason, for the murder of five more men, and for inciting a slave insurrection. He was found guilty on all counts and hanged. But the controversy about Brown, his persona, his methods, and his secret abolitionist backers, never died.

According to Ken Chowder, author of a documentary about Brown for public television:

John Brown's soul was already marching on. But the flesh-and-blood John Brown—a tanner, shepherd, and farmer, a simple and innocent man who could kill in cold blood, a mixture of opposite parts who mirrored the paradoxical America of his time—this John Brown had already vanished, and he would rarely appear again. His life instead became the subject for 140 years of spin.
⁸

Also not mentioned by Obama, for understandable reasons, was that
Osawatomie
became the name of the newspaper launched by the radical anti-capitalist, domestic terrorist group, the Weather Underground.
⁹
The Weatherman had been led by two Pentagon-bombing radicals, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, who later became Barack Obama's Hyde Park neighbors and close personal and political associates, as we have documented copiously in our previous book,
The Manchurian President
. Each issue of the Weather Underground newspaper included a printed picture of John Brown, with an explanation underneath as to why the publication had been named
Osawatomie
.
¹⁰

In his December 2011 Osawatomie speech, Obama also soundly denounced capitalism, saying it “doesn't work, it has never worked.”
¹¹
These words of the president echoed those of Michigan's Marxist congressman, John Conyers Jr., who, a month earlier, had told a gathering of the Democratic Socialists of America, “This system, this capitalist system, is broken
and may be un-repairable because the regulatory forces in the government are not willing to step up to the plate.”
¹²

The meaning of Obama's Osawatomie speech was well explained by Matthew Spalding of
National Review Online
. In his August 1910 speech, Spalding noted, Roosevelt was “at his most progressive”—as was Obama nearly 100 years later:

If there was any doubt before, it is now clear that [Obama] has given up on the center of American politics and doubled down on his governing model. And this tells us everything about where he is coming from and where he wants to go.
¹³

At Osawatomie, Obama repeatedly invoked
fairness
. Fairness, as Obama defined it, is “when everyone engages in fair play, and everybody gets a fair shot, and everybody does their fair share.” (The fairness expressed by Karl Marx was, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”
¹⁴
) Raising taxes on the wealthy would only be fair, Obama said, since
somebody
has to pay for all of his “investments” in infrastructure, education, and “green” projects, not to mention the expansion of unemployment benefits, of government bureaucracy and regulations, and the creation of new jobs programs he is pushing.

In truth, Obama's progressive conception of fairness is not the classic Marxist one, for Marx was the prophet and theoretician of a revolutionary
working class.
But today's neo-socialist progressives have completely abandoned and betrayed the working class, along with small-business owners, in favor of a welfare class, a middle class ever more dependent on government hand-outs, and a progressive, liberal elite. As Spalding puts it:

Obama has abandoned the “average, middle-class voter and his middle-class values” and “[cobbled] together an alliance of state dependents, government hangers-on, and political elites who claim the capacity to run things.” This is the rise of a “new governing class that insists on enforcing political and economic ‘fairness' rather than letting us govern ourselves. The managed quest for fairness inevitably leads to bureaucratic favoritism, inequalities based on special interests, and undue political influence.”

If not stopped, this corrupt and economically unsustainable
fairness
train will be used to steamroll American citizens for another four years and what will be left of our democracy, at the end of the line, will be unrecognizable.

Progressives such as the Economic Policy Institute almost always include “fair pay” in their credos. Thus, EPI “believes every working person deserves a good job with fair pay, affordable health care, and retirement security.”
¹⁵

We should also credit progressive Democrats both for rhetorical consistency, and for persistence. President Obama's January 2012 State of the Union address called for “equal pay for equal work.” President Clinton's 1999 State of the Union address had employed identical verbiage—“equal pay for equal work.” Clinton's SOTU pronouncement came on the heels of AFL-CIO support for the Paycheck Fairness Act of 1997,
¹⁶
a piece of legislation intended to amend and “improve” the Equal Pay Act of 1963.
¹⁷
The 1997 legislation has never been passed, but its ultimate adoption remains a prime progressive goal.

Originally, “equal pay” legislation was meant to ensure women would not be paid less for doing the same jobs as men. The 1963 Equal Pay Act addressed pay discrimination claims limited to “the few situations where women and men are doing ‘substantially the same' work,” while the newer legislation “would allow a broader range of jobs to be evaluated for gender bias” and “toughen the remedies allowed under the Equal Pay Act,” as well as “funnel more resources into enforcement.”
¹⁸

Sen. Tom Daschle (D-SD) introduced the Paycheck Fairness Act of 1997 in the Senate, along with twenty-three progressive Democrat co-sponsors.
¹⁹
A bill of the same name was introduced in the House by Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), along with ninety-five co-sponsors,
²⁰
and DeLauro has re-introduced the bill in every session of Congress through the most current one.
²¹
At the time, the likelihood of the bill's passage was considered doubtful, although five state-level “fair pay” laws had been passed and additional laws were being considered in twenty-seven states, “pushed primarily by the state federations of the AFL-CIO.”
²²
Again in 1999, both the Paycheck Fairness Act and the Equal Pay Initiative were re-introduced in Congress. Opponents claimed the bills not only overlapped with the Equal Pay Act of 1963 but also that:

the new regulations would “create costly litigation and frivolous lawsuits. The legislation would allow women to sue their employers for unlimited compensatory and punitive damages in addition to the limited damages and back-pay awards available under federal law.”
²³

A National Committee on Pay Equity—which included the working women department of the AFL-CIO—was founded in 1979 as a “coalition of women's groups, civil-rights organizations and unions concerned about the wage gap.” Twenty years later, the AFL-CIO's Karen Nussbaum claimed: “The average working family loses more than $4,000 a year because of the wage gap.”
²⁴
In 2002, the Economic Policy Institute's Heather Boushey was claiming that “women working full-time earn, on average, 80 cents for every dollar earned by men, they work longer hours for the same paycheck.”
²⁵

Arguing for the opposition were Diana Furchtgott-Roth and Christine Stolba, authors of
Women's Figures
, a book published in 1999 by the American Enterprise Institute. They produced data showing:

childless women between the ages of 27 and 33 [were making] 98 cents to every man's dollar—a statistic that shatters the glass-ceiling and “pink-ghetto” myths.
²⁶

Another opponent, Anita K. Blair, who was then vice president of the conservative Independent Women's Forum, claimed in 1999 that the AFLCIO skewed its numbers in “an attempt to make everything ‘unionized.'”
²⁷
The AFL-CIO, Blair said, wants

our salaries to be decided by government agencies rather than a worker and her boss. Mothers generally make career decisions that result in less hours or wages. That doesn't mean if you're a mother in the workforce that you are being paid less.

In a 1999 article published in the
Civil Rights Journal
, Diana Furchtgott-Roth addressed a joint AFL-CIO/Institute for Women's Policy Research study that “calculated the cost of alleged ‘pay inequity' caused by the predominance of women and men in different occupational categories.”
²⁸
The union-financed study, she continued, “compared the wages of workers in female-dominated occupations with those in non-female-dominated occupations. The workers had the same sex, age, race, educational level, marital and parental status, and urban/rural status; they lived in the same part of the country and worked the same number of hours; and they worked in firms of the same size in the same industry.” The study “concluded that women were underpaid by $89 billion per year because of occupational segregation. Without sex, race, marital and parental status, and firm and industry variables, this figure rose to $200 billion per year,” Furchtgott-Roth wrote.