As a Nairobi bureaucrat, Barack Hussein Obama Sr. advised the pro-Western Kenyan government there to "redistribute" income through higher taxes. He also demonized corporations and called for massive government "investment" in social programs.
http://www.ibdeditorials.com/images/smlissues04081908.jpg (http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=303952499910291#) Barack Obama Sr. who died in 1982 at age 46 in a Kenya car crash.

Writing in a 1965 scholarly paper, Obama's late father slammed the administration of then-President Jomo Kenyatta for moving the Third World country away from socialism toward capitalism. He chafed at the idea of relying on private investors — who earn "dividends" on their venture capital — to develop the country's fledgling economy.
"What is more important is to find means by which we can redistribute our economic gains to the benefit of all," said the senior Obama, a Harvard-educated economist. "This is the government's obligation." The "means" he had in mind were confiscatory taxes on a scale that redefines the term "progressive taxation."
"Theoretically," he wrote, "there is nothing that can stop the government from taxing 100% of income so long as the people get benefits from the government commensurate with their income which is taxed."
Therefore, he added, "I do not see why the government cannot tax those who have more and syphon some of these revenues into savings which can be utilized in investment for future development."
As Obama's father saw it, taxes couldn't be high enough, so long as the collective benefited. "Certainly there is no limit to taxation if the benefits derived from public services by society measure up to the cost in taxation which they have to pay," he said. "It is a fallacy to say that there is this limit, and it is a fallacy to rely mainly on individual free enterprise to get the savings."
His son is also pushing massive taxes and "investments" in social programs — at the expense of free enterprise. Sen. Obama wants to raise the top marginal income-tax rate to at least 39%, while increasing Social Security taxes on those with higher incomes by completely removing the payroll cap. That means many entrepreneurs would be paying 12.4% (6.2% on employer and 6.2% on employee) on Social Security payroll taxes alone, plus the 2.9% on Medicare taxes, for a total federal tax rate of 54%.
In addition, Obama wants to jack up the capital-gains tax rate and reinstate the death tax.
Echoing his father, he argues that the government should impose "tax laws that restore some balance to the distribution of the nation's wealth."
And likewise, he asserts that the nation's wealth ought to be rechanneled by government into "investments" in the economy and welfare programs that create "a new American social compact."
"We can only compete if our government makes the investments that give us a fighting chance" in the global economy, the Democrat presidential hopeful said in his 2006 book, "The Audacity of Hope." "And if we know that our families have some net beneath which they cannot fall."
"Training must be expanded," his father proposed as one of his government "investments." Likewise, Sen. Obama wants to "invest" billions more in federal jobs retraining.
His father's critique of Kenya's economic policy was published in the East Africa Journal under the title "Problems Facing Our Socialism." One discovers — after reading just a few pages into his eight-page tract, where he waxes quixotic about "communal ownership of major means of production" — that he wasn't criticizing the government for being too socialistic, but not socialistic enough.
Obama Sr. described his own economic plan, his counterproposal, as it were, as "scientific socialism — inter alia — communism." Yes, Obama's father was a communist who wanted to put socialist theory into action — by "force."
He trusted the collective over the individual, a theme he successfully instilled in his son, also Harvard-educated, with whom he visited once for a full month in Hawaii, even speaking to his prep school class. He kept up correspondence with his son through his college years.
(Media accounts portray Obama's father as being completely out of his life after leaving his mother and him at age 2. But Obama's first book, "Dreams From My Father," reveals that he remained an influential force in his life. Obama's first autobiography was devoted to "my father.")
Listen to what "the Old Man," as Obama and his siblings called him, wrote in proposing government-run farms: "If left to the individual, consolidation will take a long time to come. We have to look at priorities in terms of what is good for society, and on this basis we may find it necessary to force people to do things they would not do otherwise."
He explained that "the government should restrict the size of farms that can be owned by one individual throughout the country."
More evil than individuals, Obama's father believed, are heads of corporations. More evil still are the bankers and investors, who conspire to control the world through their evil capitalist system.
"One who has read Marx cannot fail to see that corporations are not only what Marx referred to as the advanced stage of capitalism," he wrote. "But Marx even called it finance capitalism by which a few would control the finances of so many, and through this, have not only economic power but political power as well."
It's clear from Sen. Obama's own writings and speeches that he too is no fan of business or our system of "chaotic and unforgiving capitalism," as he wrote in "Audacity." He's fond of bashing Wall Street "greed" and the post-Reagan rise of individual investing over government investing. He wants to roll back the "Ownership Society." He resents the profit motive and individuals "on the make."
"Rather than vilify the rich," he laments, "we hold them up as role models, and our mythology is steeped in stories of men on the make."
This is no small point. The man who wants to be the nation's CEO actually believes we're living in a feudal society where the rich plunder the poor. And he thinks they should not only be vilified but punished.
"The problems of poverty and racism, the uninsured and the unemployed are rooted in the desire among those at the top of the social ladder to maintain their wealth and status whatever the cost," he wrote. "Solving these problems will require changes in government policy."
That is, massive taxation, among other things (or "inter alia," as his "brilliant" father would say).
Obama wrote in "Dreams From My Father" that he was trying to impress his father by taking a low-paying job organizing and agitating in the Chicago ghetto right out of college. "I did feel that there was something to prove to my father," he said.
Yet, suspiciously, he does not once mention his father's communist leanings in an entire book dedicated to his memory. No doubt he wanted to keep that hidden. All he tells readers is that his father was pushed out of the Kenyatta administration. He does not explain why.
"Word got back to Kenyatta that the Old Man was a troublemaker and he was called in to see the president," Obama wrote, quoting his half-sister, "because he could not keep his mouth shut." About what, we aren't told.
However, Obama writes sympathetically of a comrade of his father, Oginga Odinga, who stepped down as vice president and tried to start his own party. He too was angry that President Kenyatta was letting private investors buy up businesses and land "that should be redistributed to the people," Obama said.
By 1967, two years after Obama Sr. penned his paper, Odinga had been placed under house arrest for holding a rally that turned into a riot.
Like Obama's father, Odinga was a member of the Luo tribe of Kenya. His son, Raila Odinga, ran for president in 2006. That year, Obama traveled to Kenya and appeared with Odinga at rallies where he criticized the pro-U.S. government Odinga wanted to oust.
When he lost the election the next year, despite Obama's tacit endorsement, angry Odinga supporters crying fraud sparked riots that resulted in some 1,500 deaths. Amid his ancestral country's civil unrest, Obama took time out from the campaign trail to phone Odinga to voice his support.
After weeks of violence, Odinga was granted a power-sharing deal. He's now acting prime minister.
He's also a something of a communist like his father. An East German-trained engineer, he named his oldest son after Fidel Castro. Paralleling him, Sen. Obama wants to open dialogue with Cuba and once proposed lifting the trade embargo.
The two sons have much in common. However, the son who would lead the U.S. learned from his father's mistakes and keeps his "mouth shut." Obama learned that revealing his real beliefs can jeopardize his quest for the power needed to put his "redistribution" plans into action.
IBDeditorials.com: Editorials, Political Cartoons, and Polls from Investor's Business Daily -- Like Father, Like Son (http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=303952499910291)

Obama is what 'we' get when a 40% voter turnout is considered 'heavy'. Poor Illinois and poor USA; thanks IBD.

Wow Tomder you are great at slamming one candidate. But as I see it, neither side is to perfect. BUT either would be better than what we have now.

Shall I post something slamming McCain's positions? Just to even things out?

I was considering changing the header to : 'The ACORN doesn't fall far from the tree'.

Libertarians for Obama: Is Barack Obama a Marxist? (http://libertarianobama.blogspot.com/2008/07/is-barack-obama-marxist.html)

"Marx·ism (märk-ˌsi-zəm) noun: the political, economic, and social principles and policies advocated by Marx; especially : a theory and practice of socialism including the labor theory of value, dialectical materialism, the class struggle, and dictatorship of the proletariat until the establishment of a classless society.
- Merriam Webster

It has become fashionable for some conservatives and libertarians who don't like Barack Obama to call him a "communist" or a "Marxist." Alan Keyes got the ball rolling during his pathetic 2004 run for the U.S. Senate when he called Obama a "hard core academic Marxist." Last month, disgraced former congressman Tom DeLay declared that "unless he proves me wrong, he is a Marxist." There's even a web site, CommieObama.com (I'm not going to link), that sells Soviet-style fur hats with Obama's name and a hammer and sickle.

So what has Obama done to deserve the Marxist label? Keyes, DeLay and CommieObama don't go into any detail. Nor do the occasional comments on this blog that make the same accusation. The Canada Free Press newspaper actually does try to make the case for Obama being a communist in a lengthy article - titled "Is Barack Obama a Marxist Mole?" - that's a popular link for conservative and libertarian bloggers. So what did the Free Press come up with in the way of evidence? Obama is friends with some socialists, including U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders. He has admitted attending "socialist conferences" in his youth. One of his good friends was a member of the Communist Party in the 1940s. A few communists have said nice things about Obama.

That's it? That's all you've got? Over 4,000 words and no evidence, just some innuendo and tenuous connections? This is pathetic.

Obama has proposed cutting taxes for the middle class. He's the favorite candidate of Wall Street, destroying John McCain in donations from this group. Capitalists from Warren Buffett to Paul Volcker are supporting him. This isn't exactly a candidacy that I can see Karl Marx getting behind.

Does Obama want more government involvement in health care and more regulation to protect the environment? He does (as do George W. Bush and John McCain, respectively). Obama is a center-left politician thoroughly within the American mainstream, who also has some libertarian tendencies. If this makes someone a communist, than the word has no meaning any more. Anyone who calls Obama a communist is either misinformed, dishonest or delusional. Or maybe they just have no respect for the English language.

"A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.""





Personally, aside from the campaign rhetoric, I do think Karl Marx is being proved correct concerning Capitalism. So here, concerning Karl Marx, if you're really bored and have the time read this:

Capitalism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism)

"A term denoting a distinct form of social organization, based on generalized commodity production, in which there is private ownership and/or control of the means of production. The word 'capitalism' is a relative latecomer in social science, with the OED citing its first use in 1854 ('capitalist' in 1792). Originally popularized by Marxist writers (Marx preferred to speak of the capitalist mode of production or bourgeois society), it is a term which has increasingly gained credence across the political spectrum, although this has inevitably produced inconsistency in its employment. At least three present-day usages are discernible.

Karl Marx sought the essence of capitalism neither in rational calculation nor in production for markets with the desire for gain (a system termed by Marx, 'simple commodity production'). For Marx capitalism is a historically specific mode of production, in which capital (in its many forms) is the principal means of production. A mode of production is not defined by technology but refers to the way in which the conditions of production are owned and controlled and to the social relations between individuals which result from their connection with the process of production. Each mode of production is distinguished by how the dominant class, controlling the conditions of production, ensures the extraction of the surplus from the dominated class. As Marx clarifies in a famous passage, the really distinctive feature of each society is not how the bulk of labour is done, but how the extraction of the surplus from the immediate producer is secured: 'It is in each case the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the immediate producers … in which we find the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social edifice, and hence also the political form of the relationship of sovereignty and dependence, in short the specific form of state in each case' (Capital, vol. iii, ch. 47). Capitalism is thus perceived as a transient form of class society in which the production of capital predominates, and dominates all other forms of production (generalized commodity production). Capital is not a thing, not simply money or machinery, but money or machinery inserted within a specific set of social relations whose aim is the expansion of value (the accumulation of capital). Capitalism is therefore built on a social relation of struggle between the bourgeoisie and the working class. Its historical prerequisite was the concentration of ownership in the hands of the ruling class and the consequential and 'bloody' emergence of a propertyless class for whom the sale of labour-power is their only source of livelihood. The distinction between the sale of labour and the sale of labour-power (the capacity to labour) is crucial, Marx argues, for understanding how all profit derives from the unpaid and therefore exploited labour of the worker. Capitalism therefore combines formal and legal equality in exchange with subordination and exploitation in production. The existence of trade, rational calculation, production for the market, the use of money, and the presence of financiers is not enough to constitute a capitalist society. For Marx, capitalism is based on a specific form of private property which enables capital to yoke labour to create surplus value in production. Like Weber, Marx portrayed capitalist society as the most developed historical organization of production. Unlike Weber, Marx envisaged that class struggle would intensify and produce an ever-expanding union of workers who, as a self-conscious, independent movement of the majority, would rise up and abolish capitalism.

All periodizations of capitalism are problematical. Whilst Marx claims that in Western Europe bourgeois society began to evolve in the sixteenth century and was making giant strides towards maturity in the eighteenth century, Karl Polanyi concludes that capitalism did not emerge until the Poor Law Reform Act of 1834. Capital existed in many forms—commercial capital and money-dealing capital—long before industrialization. For this reason the period between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries is often referred to as the merchant capital phase of capitalism. Industrial capitalism, which Marx dates from the last third of the eighteenth century, finally establishes the domination of the capitalist mode of production.


For most analysts, mid- to late-nineteenth-century Britain is seen as the apotheosis of the laissez-faire phase of capitalism. This phase took off in Britain in the 1840s with the Repeal of the Corn Laws, and the Navigation Acts, and the passing of the Banking Act. In line with the teachings of classical political economy (Adam Smith and David Ricardo), the state adopted a liberal form which encouraged competition and fostered the development of a 'self-regulating' market society. Liberal and conservative thinkers have been keen to identify this particular phase of capitalism with the essence of capitalism itself. This has encouraged some theorists to dispense with the term completely when describing societies in the post-1945 period. Hence during the post-war long boom (1950-70), an explosion of terms—industrial society; post-industrial society; welfare statism; post-capitalist society—threatened to displace the centrality of the concept of capitalism. The waves of economic and political crises experienced since this period, however, led many commentators to reinstate the term, particularly under the influence of the new right (Hayek and Friedman). In contrast to liberals, writers in the Marxist tradition understand twentieth-century developments in terms of the movement from the laissez-faire phase of capitalism to the monopoly stage of capitalism. On the basis of Lenin's famous pamphlet, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, the monopoly stage is said to exist when: the export of capital alongside the export of commodities becomes of prime importance; banking and industrial capital merge to form finance capital; production and distribution are centralized in huge trusts and cartels; international monopoly combines of capitalists divide up the world into spheres of interest; and national states seek to defend capitalist interests thus perpetuating the likelihood of war (see also imperialism).

Since the extension of the franchise in nineteenth-century Britain there has been a hotly contested debate on the relationship between democracy and capitalism. The experience of the twentieth century, however, shows that there are a variety of political forms—liberal democratic, social democratic, fascist, statist, republican, monarchical—which can accompany capitalist economies. This constitutes the basis for the study of the state in capitalism.

Although the world market has always formed the backdrop to the development of capitalism, a number of recent changes, associated with both the 'globalization of capital', and the demise of the Soviet Union, have strengthened the claim that capitalism should now be viewed as a world system. (See also Anglo-Saxon Capitalism, Rhenish Capitalism.)"[/QUOTE]

Shall I post something slamming McCain's positions? Just to even things out?

Take a shot at it and see if it is worse than anything I've already said about McCain. This posting was a total C/P from an op-ed in an Investment publication. It told me a lot more about Obama's old man than Obama appears comfortable to reveal himself.
As to his economic outlook ;is it true or false when the author claims :
he asserts that the nation's wealth ought to be rechanneled by government into "investments" in the economy and welfare programs that create "a new American social compact."

The "social compact " in this country is the US Constitution .It is not an economic theory.



Bobby's defense of Marx is interesting .

Thanks. It was for educational purposes only.