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Obama's Three-Tiered Wealth Redistribution Plan: Individual, Regional, and Global
By Lee Cary
Stanley Kurtz's newest book fills in the middle tier of President Obama's three-tiered plan to redistribute American wealth.
Individual Redistribution
The first tier, taking their "fair share" of taxes from the rich, received early attention in the '08 campaign. It surfaced with notoriety in candidate Obama's street conversation with Joe "The Plumber" Wurzelbacher. It's since become the linchpin for the president's and the Democrats' continuous engagement in class warfare.
Regional Redistribution
Kurtz's new book, entitled Spreading the Wealth: How Obama is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities, warns that Obama, driven by a community organizer's disdain for "white flight" from poor urban neighborhoods to suburbia, has aligned with like-minded community organizers -- e.g., Mike Kruglik and Kruglik's organization "Building One America" -- in a move to redistribute wealth from the suburbs to the inner city.
In a National Review online article, Kurtz wrote:
Obama is a longtime supporter of "regionalism," the idea that the suburbs should be folded into the cities, merging schools, housing, transportation, and above all taxation. To this end, the president has already put programs in place designed to push the country toward a sweeping social transformation in a possible second term. The goal: income equalization via a massive redistribution of suburban tax money to the cities.
Obama's plans to undercut the political and economic independence of America's suburbs reach back decades. The community organizers who trained him in the mid-1980s blamed the plight of cities on taxpayer "flight" to suburbia. Beginning in the mid-1990s, Obama's mentors at the Gamaliel Foundation (a community-organizing network Obama helped found) formally dedicated their efforts to the budding fight against suburban "sprawl." From his positions on the boards of a couple of left-leaning Chicago foundations, Obama channeled substantial financial support to these efforts. On entering politics, he served as a dedicated ally of his mentors' anti-suburban activism.
"Regional" redistribution -- the middle tier of Obama's three-tiered scheme for redistribution -- is about taking from the middle-class suburbs and giving to the poor inner city.
The centerpiece of the Obama administration's anti-suburban plans is a little-known and seemingly modest program called the Sustainable Communities Initiative. The "regional planning grants" funded under this initiative -- many of them in battleground states like Florida, Virginia, and Ohio -- are set to recommend redistributive policies, as well as transportation and development plans, designed to undercut America's suburbs.
As background to the notion of regional redistribution, it's worth noting how Michelle LaVaughn Robinson defined the purpose of her 1985 Princeton thesis written for her undergraduate degree from the school's Department of Sociology.
The purpose of this study is to examine various attitudes of Black Princeton alumni in their present state and as they are perceived by the alumni to have changed over time. This study tries to examine the following attitudes of alumni: the extent to which they are comfortable interacting with Black and with White individuals in various activities; the extent to which they are motivated to benefit the Black com-munity in comparison to other entities such as themselves, their families, God, etc.; the ideologies they hold with respects to race relations between the Black and White communities; and feelings they have toward the Black lower class such as a feeling of obligation that they should help improve the lives of this particular group of Blacks.
As to why she picked this topic, Ms. Robinson wrote:
My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my "Blackness" than ever before. I have found that at Princeton no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my White professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don't belong. Regardless of the circumstances under which I interact with Whites at Princeton, it often seems as if, to them, I will always be Black first and a student second.
These experiences have made it apparent to me that the path I have chosen to follow by attending Princeton will likely lead to my further integration and/or assimilation into a White cultural and social structure that will only allow me to remain on the periphery of society; never becoming a full participant. This realization has presently, made my goals to actively utilize my resources to benefit the Black community more desirable.
The results of her study did not meet her preconceived notions. Under the heading of "Major Conclusion," she wrote:
The major conclusion to be drawn from the findings of the study is as follows: despite the respondents' sense of comfort with Blacks and Whites, their motivation to benefit the Black community, or their attitudes towards the Black lower class before Princeton, more respondents tended to identify with Blacks during Princeton in every measured respect. However, after Princeton this identification decreased drastically[.] ...
When I first set out to examine the attitudes of the respondents towards Blacks and Whites, I believed that the extent to which a respondent identified with the Black community would determine that individual's attitudes. In defining the concept of identification or the ability to identify with the Black community, I based my definition on the premise that there is a distinctive Black culture very different from White culture. Elements of Black culture which make it unique from White culture such as its music, its language, the struggles and a "consciousness" shared by its people may be attributed to the injustices and oppressions suffered by this race of people which are not comparable to the experiences of any other race of people through this country's history. However, with the increasing integration of Blacks into the mainstream society, many "integrated Blacks" have lost touch with the Black culture in their attempts to become adjusted and comfortable in their new culture-the White culture. Some of these Blacks are no longer able to enjoy the qualities which make Black culture so unique or are unable to openly share their culture with other Blacks because they have become so far removed from these experiences and, in some instances, ashamed of them as a result of their integration.
At the close of her thesis, Ms. Robinson's acknowledged that:
I began this study questionning [sic] my own attitudes as a future alumnus [sic]. I wondered whether or not my education at Princeton would affect my identification with the Black community. I hoped that these findings would help me conclude that despite the high degree of identification with Whites as a result of the educational and occupational path that Black Princeton alumni follow, the alumni would still maintain a certain level of identification with the Black community. However, these findings do not support this possibility.
Michelle Obama's influence within the White House should not be underestimated.
"Regionalism" is not about redistributing the money of affluent whites to inner cities.
It is about raiding the suburban middle class, of all colors, to underwrite the failed urban centers of America's big cities.
If the black graduates of Ivy League schools carve out successful careers for themselves and move out of their old neighborhoods, where they associate more with their new neighbors than with their old neighborhoods, then the government will redistribute their wealth, too, back to where they came from and fulfill, for them, their unique racial and cultural responsibly to the inner-city black community.
Global Redistribution
The third, and broadest, redistribution tier -- at the international level -- surfaced with little fanfare in 2007, while Obama was a U.S. senator from Illinois.
On June 26, 2008, the American Thinker posted a short blog that noted that:
The Global Poverty Act of 2007 (S.2433) is coming up for a Senate vote sometime after the July 4 recess, according the office of Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison. Once Harry Reid and the Democrat leadership put it on the calendar, we could have as little as a week to prepare for the vote.
The bill is sponsored in the Senate by Barack Obama. Read about it here.
If passed, it will cost taxpayers $845,000,000,000 over the next 13 years, in addition to our current foreign aid expenditures.
And the best part is that it will be administered in conjunction with...brace yourselves...the United Nations. The same one of "Food-for-Oil" fame.
It passed (H.R. 1302) earlier by a unanimous voice vote in the House.
It's about global income redistribution. Their distribution - our income.
Heard much debate about it? Ah, it's only 8.5 tenths of a trillion.
Although the bill passed the House, it was never funded. It was the only Senate Bill that Obama initiated in his brief career as a federal legislator.
One curious aspect of the U.N.'s role in the Global Poverty Act of 2007's funding scheme was generally unknown, or ignored, by the media back then.
Antoin "Tony" Rezko, a longtime key financial backer of Obama's political career in Illinois, and a member of his Senate Campaign Finance Committee (along with current White House insider Valerie Jarrett), was a close associate of Saddam Hussein's former international banker, Nadhmi Auchi.
Auchi, an Iraqi by birth, is now a British citizen and multi-billionaire, and an admirer of Jesse Jackson. He was once a major shareholder of NBP Paribas banking group (until he was convicted of bank fraud). NBP handled the U.N.'s Food for Oil funds.
John A. Shaw, a former U.S. official in the Defense, State, and Commerce Departments, was responsible for having Auchi put on the persona non grata list of foreign citizens not granted entry into the U.S. Shaw is convinced that Rezko was Auchi's "bagman" in Chicago (and that Obama's Senate office tried to get Auchi's visa restored).
The Global Poverty Act of 2007 was a clue to the ultimate scope of the Obama redistribution agenda: from individual to regional and across the globe.
Remember -- as a presidential candidate, Obama promised to "change the world."