racist

There are only 36,697 black farmers in the entire country, but in a class-action lawsuit, more than 86,000 African-Americans claimed to have suffered from race discrimination by the Department of Agriculture during their time as farmers.   They are getting “‘virtually automatic’ $50,000 payouts” at taxpayer expense, thanks to the Obama administration.  It has repeatedly loosened the requirements for payouts in a class-action lawsuit against the government known as the Pigford case, in order to make such payouts possible.  Essentially, the Obama administration is using the case to award race-based reparations to people who never farmed or even intended to farm.  The government’s collusion with the plaintiffs’ lawyers in this case will ultimately cost taxpayers billions.

The next time you hear President Obama on TV challenging his critics to identify any unnecessary government spending that can be cut, and suggesting that there is no waste to be found in the federal budget, keep this case in mind.  In 2009, Obama made a big show of ordering his cabinet to come up with a measly $100 million in cuts even as he submitted a record budget request of $3.67 trillion (not counting hundreds of billions in “emergency” spending).  That $100 million was less than 0.003 percent of the budget, and is much smaller than the billions that the government will ultimately waste on the Pigford case.

The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that “President Obama’s policies would add more than $9.7 trillion to the national debt over the next decade.”  That’s despite the fact that there are $3 trillion in tax increases built into the president’s budget.

Obama recently signed a deficit-expanding $26 billion public-employee bailout.  The stimulus package is now expected to cost $75 billion more than predicted.  The stimulus package is using taxpayer subsidies to replace U.S. jobs with foreign green jobs. It also destroyed jobs in America’s export sector.

One issue in the Pigford case was the fact that people with bad credit ratings didn’t get loans from the Agriculture Department as often as people with good credit ratings.  That was deemed “discrimination” because African-Americans tended to have lower credit ratings on average than whites.

Obama’s racist, communist, America-bashing Green Jobs Czar, Van Jones, has resigned after revelations that he was a 9/11 “Truther,” who believed that George Bush may have been behind the terrorist attacks on 9/11.

But Obama has long been aware of Jones’ extremism, wacky statements, and arrest record, which would have come to light months ago during the White House vetting process, as former White House staffer Jeffrey Lord and National Review‘s Andrew McCarthy note. The Secret Service would have investigated Jones’ past and Marxist views and informed Obama about them.

As the Washington Examiner‘s Byron York noted, most of the media systematically ignored revelations about Jones’ disturbing past and extremist views, seeking to prevent damage to the Obama Administration. Despite weeks of controversy over Jones’ extreme views on talk radio, blogs, and Fox News, newspapers like the New York Times, and TV networks like ABC and NBC, refused to cover the controversy until after Jones resigned, while the Washington Post and CBS covered the story only when his resignation was imminent.

Slate journalist Mickey Kaus, who voted for Obama but has been critical of the Administration, ridicules newspapers like the New York Times for deliberately concealing the Van Jones controversy in order to protect the Obama Administration. “‘Readers of the print edition will never have heard of the presidential appointee so controversial the President had to dump him. Is this a milestone in the decline of the NYT?’ . . .It seems this may be just another installment of the NYT’s running feature, ‘You Know That Guy You’ve Never Heard About? Well, He’s Gone.’”

Jones is a race-baiter, “self-avowed communist” and Truther who believed that George Bush may have been behind the 9/11 attacks.

Why even a Democratic White House would hire Jones is beyond understanding. In 1998, Jones defended Al Qaeda and bashed Bill Clinton. Why would Obama even think of hiring someone who said a few years ago that he was part of a “global struggle against the U.S.”?

Jones has also glorified convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal, in a campaign that likened supporters of the murdered police officer to the KKK.

Jones, who set up a group that is orchestrating advertiser boycotts of Obama’s media critics, was until recently a “member of a radical communist group that was dedicated to ‘organizing a revolutionary movement in America.’”

Jones also claimed that mass murder is a white characteristic, saying that the Columbine killers would not have committed their crimes had they not been white. “‘You’ve never seen a Columbine done by a black child,’ Jones, who’s African-American, said in the 2005 video. ‘Never. They always say, “We can’t believe it happened here. We can’t believe these suburban white kids.” It’s only them.’”

Many officials in the Obama Administration are sympathetic to Marxist regimes. For example, Obama’s appointee to be the FCC’s “diversity officer” is Mark Lloyd, a big fan of Venezuela’s socialist dictator, Hugo Chavez. Although Chavez has shot unarmed demonstrators, Lloyd has called socialist Venezuela a model, praised its authoritarian leader’s “incredible revolution” and defended his attacks on independent media.

Obama’s nominee to be Assistant Secretary of State, Arturo Valenzuela, has a reputation as a loud defender of Venezuelan dictator Chavez’s terrible record on freedom of the press. Valenzuela is a big supporter of imposing sanctions on Honduras, which ousted its left-wing would-be dictator. Americans for Limited Government says that “Arturo Valenzuela has never met a Marxist dictator that he didn’t embrace.” ALG’s assessment of Valenzuela is echoed by liberal Latin America expert Martin Edwin Andersen.

The Obama Administration is extremely hostile to non-communist Honduras and its democratically-elected legislature, demanding that they allow the return to power of Honduras’s bullying ex-president and would-be dictator. The ex-president’s removal was perfectly constitutional, say many experts, such as attorneys Octavio Sanchez, Miguel Estrada, and Dan Miller, former Assistant Secretary of State Kim Holmes, Stanford’s William Ratliff, and “even left-liberal analysts.”

The Obama Administration cites the UN’s support for the bullying ex-president to justify demanding that Honduras allow him to return. But the UN is openly biased in favor of left-wing dictators.

The UN has just declared Fidel Castro, the longtime Communist dictator of Cuba, the “World Hero of Solidarity.” Castro killed thousands and thousands of people during his rule, torturing some to death (including a few American citizens), and Cuba remains an oppressive dictatorship even today.

So it’s not surprising that the UN backs Honduras’s bullying ex-president Manuel Zelaya, given his fondness for left-wing rhetoric. (Two months ago, soldiers acting on orders of Honduras’s Supreme Court arrested Zelaya after he systematically abused his powers. After the Court quite legally declared that Zelaya was no longer president, he was duly replaced by Honduras’s Congress with a civilian, the Congressional Speaker).

The Obama Administration recently decided to impose sanctions on Honduras, and indicated it will not recognize future democratic elections in Honduras unless Honduras first lets ex-president Zelaya return to power.

“Green jobs” is a scam and excuse for vast amounts of corporate welfare, as is the cap-and-trade “global warming” scheme backed by Obama, which would rip off the public and do nothing to protect the environment, while enriching politically-connected companies like General Electric and destroying millions of jobs.

“The Town Hall Mob.”  That’s the title of Paul Krugman’s opinion piece in the New York Times today – and it’s a doozy.  In his article, Krugman opines that the citizens protesting against health care “reform” represent “something new and ugly.”

Then, in some sort of convoluted logic bordering on paranoia, Krugman asserts that the Town Hall protesters are really racists – and are probably “birthers” as well.

That is, the driving force behind the town hall mobs is probably the same cultural and racial anxiety that’s behind the “birther” movement, which denies Mr. Obama’s citizenship. Senator Dick Durbin has suggested that the birthers and the health care protesters are one and the same; we don’t know how many of the protesters are birthers, but it wouldn’t be surprising if it’s a substantial fraction.

It’s instructive to read the comments – many unusually critical of the article and its attack on free speech.  (Usually the comments are fawning – “Oh, Dr. Krugman, wise Nobel Prize winner.  Your analysis is brilliant in showing that those who don’t believe in Obama are nothing but right-wing reactionary nuts who are driven by racism and greed and profits and all the bad things in the world.  Please, please continue to expose them for what they are through your brilliant articles that shine with brilliance.”)