Why Euthanasia is Not “Dignified”

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Guest: Dr. David Noebel, president, Summit Ministries

Last week, we analyzed President Obama’s plan for government-run health care and concluded that it would have deleterious, even unbiblical, financial, ecclesiastical, and moral effects.

This week in Hour 1 of The Christian Worldview, we will delve deeper into the moral aspect of government-run health care to discover that euthanasia (“the act of putting to death painlessly or allowing to die, as by withholding extreme medical measures”) is the inexorable result for the elderly and disabled when health care is controlled by government.  Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the brother of Obama’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and the Health Policy Adviser at the Office of Management and Budget, says as much in this article.

But shouldn’t Christians be for easing the pain of those who are suffering and letting them, as this article suggests, “die with dignity”?  Read more

2009 Summit Ministries Essay Contest. Deadline June 30th

Win a half-tuition scholarship to a two-week Summit Student Conference!

Grand prize: Two half-tuition scholarships ($400 value each) for one male student and one female student to a Summit Ministries Student Conference in Colorado.

Entry prize: A complimentary copy of Summit president Dr. David Noebel’s classic book, Understanding the Times, will be sent to all valid entrants.

Essay Topic: Write a letter to an atheist, like Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion) or Christopher Hitchens (God is Not Great), about why evidence and reason point to the existence of God.

Essay Length: 700-800 words

Deadline: June 30, 2009.  Winners announced July 3, 2009 at www.Summit.org and www.TheChristianWorldview.com.

Eligibility: Students aged 16-22

Other: Scholarship can be used in the summer of 2009 or 2010.  More info about Summit at www.Summit.org.

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Creating a Heaven on Earth

What do the following places have in common: Trumbull Phalanx in Ohio, Modern Times in New York, Brook Farm in Massachusetts, New Harmony in Indiana, United Order in Utah, Amana Colonies in Iowa, Oneida Community in New York, a kibbutz in Israel, and the Pilgrim’s Plymouth Plantation?

Each was an attempt to establish a form of heaven on earth, or put another way, to establish through socialism a utopian community by (1) abolishing private property and (2) eradicating self-interested acquisitiveness.

There are basically three forms of socialism: utopian (Robert Owen, Saint-Simon, and Francois Fourier), revolutionary (Marxism-Leninism), and fascism (Fabian, Social Democracy). Continuing attempts such as those listed above to establish some form of utopian socialism reinforce the observation of Alfred North Whitehead—”the European philosophical tradition is…a series of footnotes to Plato.”

Whitehead was himself an influential twentieth century philosopher and mathematician, who saw that Europe and America were enamored with Plato’s “general ideas” scattered throughout his various writings, none more so than the communistic ideas in his Republic.

In fact, the pilgrims came to these shores establishing Plato’s communistic utopia. Plymouth Plantation’s William Bradford mentions him by name, referring to “that conceit of Plato’s and other ancients applauded by some of later times; that the taking away of property and bringing in community into a commonwealth would make them happy and flourishing; as if they were wiser than God.” Bradford learned, however, that God is wiser than Plato.

It seems as if the United States failed to learn her lesson from our early Fathers, as we find ourselves once again toying with Plato!

Eric Etheredge of the New York Times refers to President Barack Obama as a “social democrat.” Gene Edward Veith of World magazine (May 9, 2009, p. 56) notes that “social democrat” is code for socialist, using the Merriam-Webster online dictionary to define social democracy as “a political movement advocating a gradual and peaceful transition from capitalism to socialism by democratic means.”

Veith develops the point further by using the Encyclopedia Britannica to show that social democracy is “a political ideology that advocates a peaceful, evolutionary transition of society from capitalism to socialism using established political processes. Based on the 19th-century socialism and the tenets of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, social democracy shares common ideological roots with communism.”

Thus we see that the United States of America is being led into another socialistic experiment to create anew a heaven on earth by its President, his Democratic administration, and the House of Representatives (flush with four socialistic organizations, including the Congressional Progressive Caucus and the Congressional Black Caucus).

Utopian socialism did not work for the pilgrims, who were primarily Christian in orientation, and neither Social Democracy nor the John Maynard Keynes evolutionary variety of socialism will work today for men and women of a vastly different orientation.

Why Biblical Christians Should Reject the “Christian” Left

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LISTEN NOW: [audio:http://www.thechristianworldview.com/audio/TCW040409pod_hour2.mp3]

Guest: Dr. David Noebel, president, Summit Ministries

If a man is known by the friends he keeps, then President Obama’s choice of “Christian” leftist Jim Wallis as his spiritual adviser is very telling.  It actually makes perfect sense as both men are committed socialists.  Wallis is the president of Sojourners, a “Christian” organization dedicated to advancing socialism in the U.S. and abroad under the ruse of “justice and peace.”

In Hour 2 of The Christian Worldview on Saturday, Dr. David Noebel, president of Summit Ministries, will help us understand Jim Wallis and “Christian Leftism”, how much it has infected mainstream Evangelicalism, and why biblical Christians need to reject it.  Dr. Noebel will also speak about the coming new global economic order being advocated by world leaders at this past week’s G20 meetings.

Related Article:
Shared Misery: The Socialization of America

Jim Wallis: Obama’s “Red” Spiritual Adviser

El Salvador has officially joined the Red regimes of Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Ecuador and Bolivia. South America is turning Red, dark Red, and little is being said to alert North Americans of the encroaching Red plague. Perhaps that’s because North America is moving in the same direction. The president of the United States has surrounded himself with socialists, and some of those closest to him have had a part in turning South America Red.

According to the Associated Press (March 17, 2009), Mauricio Funes, the presidential candidate of the Farbundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) is the new head of the nation of El Salvador. Behind Funes “is a party of former Marxist guerrillas that fought to overthrow U.S.-backed governments in the 1980s and whose rise to power has raised fears of a communist regime in the war-scarred Central American country.”

The AP admits “ex-guerrillas will almost certainly form part of the Funes government, including Vice President-elect Salvador Sanchez Ceren, a rebel commander-turned-congressman.”

And then there’s the “drug” connection! Investor’s Business Daily reports that “last May, the FMLN confessed to ‘a relationship’ with Colombia’s drug-trafficking FARC Marxist terrorists after documents found on the computer of dead FARC chieftain Raul Reyes, killed in a 2008 raid, proved it” (March 16, 2009).

Funes, of course, says he’ll “govern moderately, more like Brazil ’socialist’ President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva than Venezuela’s radical [communist] Hugo Chavez.” Of course, this is what the Nicaraguan communist Daniel Ortega said, too, before he displayed his communist “proletariat morality” by hugging the communist dictators Castro and Chavez. Ortega and all his South American pals are hard-core Marxist-Leninists.

While all of this, of course, is relevant to an ardent free-market capitalist, what really frightens me is that Obama’s latest announced “spiritual adviser” has had connections with all these Marxist regimes. And who is the president’s latest adviser? The Rev. Jim Wallis.

Frontpage Magazine (March 17, 2009) reports, “The most notable of [Obama's] spiritual advisers today is his friend of many years, Rev. Jim Wallis.” Rev. Wallis admits that he and Obama have “been talking faith and politics for a long time.” He was picked by Obama to draft the faith-based policies of his campaign at the Democratic National Convention in Denver last year. Why should this alarm us?

First, Jim Wallis has had relationships with the communist Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES).

Second, his “Witness for Peace” was an attempt to defend the Nicaraguan Sandinistas! Wallis, together with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright (Obama’s former pastor of 20 years) “rallied support for the communist Nicaraguan regime and protested actions by the United States which supported the anti-communist Contra rebels” (Family World News, February 2009, p. 7).

Third, Wallis and his Sojourners community of fellow-travelers believe Fidel Castro’s Cuba, Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela, Daniel Ortega’s Nicaragua and the other revolutionary forces “restructuring socialist societies” are the communist paradises the United States needs to emulate in order to establish “social justice.” Writing in the November 1983 issue of Sojourners, Jacob Laksin notes, “Jim Wallis and Jim Rice drafted what would become the charter of leftist activists committed to the proliferation of communist revolutions in Central America” (Laksin, “Sojourners: History, Activities and Agendas” in Discoverthenetworks.org., 2005).

The ugly truth is Wallis wishes to see the destruction of the United States as a nation and in its place “a radical nonconformist community” patterned after the progressive, socialist commune he established in Washington, D.C., in 1971 (Laksin, Ibid.).

“The Sojourners community,” says Laksin, “actively embraced ‘liberation theology,’ rallying to the cause of communist regimes that had seized power with the promise of bringing about a revolutionary restructuring of society.” Clark Pinnock, a disaffected former member of Sojourners, said that the community’s members were “100 percent in favor of the Nicaraguan [communist] revolution” (Laksin, Ibid.).

All this revolutionary activity in spite of the fact that today’s Cuba, for example, has to import 84 percent of its food supply due to the socialistic mess of the agricultural system (150,000 oxen till the ground because tractors represent capitalism). However, in a move that looks more like capitalism than Marxism’s state farms, “Raul Castro is moving to boost food production by putting more land under the control of private farmers” (The Weekly Standard, March 23, 2009).

It appears that Raul Castro is learning what America’s early pilgrims learned back in the 1620s! William Bradford noted in his “History of Plymouth Plantation” that once he canceled the pilgrims’ socialistic experiment and provided each settler with a piece of property to till, starvation was averted. We can hope and pray that Raul Castro continues to implement more capitalistic policies and will learn firsthand the economic system that has brought more people out of poverty than any other in the history of the world. (See Rodney Stark, “The Victory of Reason.”)

Of course, Wallis should have learned the lessons of Plymouth Plantation early in his education, but may not have because our Secular Humanistic K-12 curricula delete most of the history of the pilgrims and the Mayflower Compact in an attempt to avoid acknowledging its “advancement of Christianity.” (Sadly, one first-grade textbook that does include the pilgrims has them “praying to the Indians.”)

For years, Wallis has been in the forefront of the “evangelical” left and has been fêted at numerous evangelical colleges and seminaries. That seems to be the “in” thing right now. His publication Sojourners is piled high on these campuses for the reading pleasure of the naïve and foolish.

Unbeknown to these colleges and seminaries is Wallis’ Red background. He was the president of the radical Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) while at Michigan State University. The SDS was the youth arm of the League for Industrial Democracy – the American counterpart to the British Fabian Society founded to promote socialism throughout the West. One of the League’s mentors for years was Norman Thomas, who argued that “the American people will never knowingly adopt socialism, but under the name of liberalism, they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program until one day America will be a socialist nation without ever knowing how it happened” (Google, Norman Thomas quotes). Another prominent League mentor was John Dewey, a signatory of the atheistic, socialistic 1933 “Humanist Manifesto.” The SDS actually merits a chapter in Richard J. Ellis’s work “The Dark Side of the Left: Illiberal Egalitarianism in America,” published by the University of Kansas Press.

In October of 1969, SDS original organizer Tom Hayden directed his followers to “set off on a rampage, smashing windows of parked cars, hurling rocks and bricks through apartment windows, and fighting with police.” Hayden blamed the police for his violence even though later his followers “comforted themselves, because theirs was a violence to end all violence, a liberating and righteous violence that would rid the world of a system that deformed and destroyed people. Such glorious ends justified, even ennobled, violent means” (Ellis, p. 137).

Ellis insists that the language of revolution and violent confrontation was evident throughout the ranks of the SDS. Jim Wallis was part and parcel of this pro-communist group of radicals and revolutionaries.

Wallis’ Sojourners enterprise has been a radical, socialistic undertaking from the start. Frontpage Magazine (March 17, 2009) says, “As one of its first acts, Sojourners formed a commune in the Washington, D.C., neighborhood of Southern Columbia Heights, where members shared their finances and participated in various activist campaigns that centered on attacking the U.S. foreign policy, denouncing American ‘imperialism,’ and extolling Marxist revolutionary movements in the Third World.”

Sojourners contributing editors included the radical Daniel “Pentagon Papers” Berrigan, Walter Brueggemann, James Hal Cone (author of the racist “Black Theology and Black Power” in which the white race is depicted as devils), Rosemary Radford Ruether (professor of Feminist Theology, Catholics for Choice, God is the feminine Gaia), Ron Sider, Cornel West and Garry Wills. Today, Sojourners’ Board of Directors includes Wallis, Ron Sider, Brian McLaren and Bart Campolo.

Over the years, Wallis has been pro-Vietcong and actually gloried in America’s defeat in Vietnam. He said, “I don’t know how else to express the quiet emotion that rushed through me when the news reports showed that the United States had finally been defeated in Vietnam” (Ronald H. Nash, “Why The Left Is Not Right,” p. 58).

However, like Jane Fonda, Wallis said next to nothing about the communist genocide that followed the wars in Vietnam and Cambodia. In fact, in a typical communist response, he criticized those fleeing Vietnam by boat as somehow attempting “to support their consumer habits in other lands” (Nash, p. 59).

Wallis has been closely associated with Richard Barnet (former contributing editor of Sojourners) and the Institute for Policy Studies, a radical left-wing think tank supporting socialist revolutionaries around the world; Wallis had his book “The Soul of Politics” published by Orbis Books in 1994, a radical left-wing Roman Catholic publishing arm of the radical left-wing Maryknollers; Sojourner magazine has been a strong supporter of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro and, indeed, has supported every left-wing, liberation theology cause around the world.

And yes, Wallis portrays the evangelical right that happens to be pro-American and anti-communist “as members of the forces of darkness” (Nash, p. 66, 71). For Wallis, a good Christian is someone who is pro-communist and socialist, while a bad Christian is someone who is anti-communist and pro-capitalist. The cry of the Sojourners crowd is “social justice” for the poor and downtrodden – social justice being code for socialism/communism.

I could not disagree more strongly. I contend that the Marxist-Leninist worldview is 100 percent contrary to biblical Christianity, and I document this extensively in my book “Understanding the Times.” Further, communism is directly responsible for the murder of tens of millions of human beings, a slaughter documented by Stephane Courtois, et. al. in their 1999 book, “The Black Book on Communism” (Harvard University Press).

I will attempt to be as kind and gentle as humanly possible and break the news to the Rev. Wallis and his “spiritual” advisee Barack Obama – socialism has never lifted the poor out of poverty. It has equally distributed poverty, but it has never been able to create the wealth that is partially responsible for lifting the poor out of poverty.

I say “partially responsible” because one’s worldview is even more important than wealth in reducing poverty. But socialism is a flawed idea, and it poisons the worldview of the people it influences. Our brothers on the evangelical left, who are concerned with the poor, need to read Theodore Dalrymple’s “Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass.” Although not a Christian, Dalrymple understands perfectly the importance of a proper worldview and its role in combating poverty, drugs, crime and broken families.

Can we admit a hard truth? Christian capitalist Truett Cathy’s Chic-fil-A has done more to fight poverty and help the poor than all the pronouncements of Jim Wallis, Ron Sider, Daniel Berrigan, Brian McLaren, Tony and Bart Campolo, and their entire crew of left-wing sociological and economic friends combined.

Thomas Sowell explains, “It would be devastating to the egos of the intelligentsia to realize, much less admit, that businesses have done more to reduce poverty than all the intellectuals put together. Ultimately, it is only wealth that can reduce poverty, and most of the intelligentsia have no interest whatever in finding out what actions and policies increase the national wealth” (Capitalism Magazine, May 9, 2005).

In fact, the intellectuals are the very ones who complain about those who do increase wealth. Again, Thomas Sowell speaks to this issue: “Think about the things that have improved our lives the most over the past century – medical advances, the transportation revolution, huge increases in consumer goods, dramatic improvements in housing, the computer revolution. The people who created these things – the doers – are not popular heroes. Our heroes are the talkers who complain about the doers.”

Socialism is built on a slogan: “What can government do for me today?” instead of “What can I do to better prepare myself to take care of myself in order to be a better Christian and servant of my Lord?” Preparation involves individual responsibility, traditional family values, education, love of God and neighbor, and compassion for the up-and-outers as well as the down-and-outers.

Socialists stand against nearly every Christian, conservative principle imaginable. Compare the socialist agenda with Yale professor David Gelernter’s summary of the conservative position – “the freedom of every American to make his own way, free speech on the radio and everywhere else, free elections for workers and other people … freedom to acknowledge and celebrate the nation’s rootedness in Christianity, Judaism and the Bible … love of liberty and love of God” (National Review, March 23, 2009, p. 32).

In 2006, Barack Obama was the keynote speaker at Jim Wallis’ Call to Renewal conference, “Building a Covenant for a New America.” Following his address, in an interview by the United Church News, he cited “the teachings of the UCC (United Church of Christ) as foundation stones for his political work.” He said, “Just as my pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright from Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, welcomed me as a young man years ago, UCC churches across the country open their doors to millions of Americans each Sunday . … I believe that democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal values. Social justice and national security are both universal values, values that may originate for some in their religious beliefs, but are shared by us all.”

What Americans can look forward to now that Rev. Wallis has the ear of the president is what Sojourners magazine has been pedaling since 1971 – “advocating America’s transformation into a socialist nation” (Accuracy in Media Research Report, May 1983, Section 19).

Could it be that America, who turned her back on God by deciding that prayer and the Bible can no longer grace her public schools, but homosexuality (indeed the whole GLBTQ rainbow), abortion counseling and condoms in school colors are welcomed, is experiencing the very judgment of God? There are consequences for “forgetting God,” as Solzhenitsyn noted about his mother country, Russia. These same consequences are piling up on the metro-sexual West in general and on the United States in particular.

Shared Misery: The Socialization of America

In retrospect, we may discover that 1883 was a most significant year. We’re familiar with 1848 giving us The Communist Manifesto and 1859 giving us The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, but 1883 gave us three portentous happenings. These seemingly unrelated happenings turned history toward socialism.

1. Karl Marx died on March 14, 1883, and was buried in Highgate Cemetery in London, England. The assumption that Communism died with him was logical since only six people attended his funeral. But the truth is that it had not yet begun its murderous journey through the 20th century.
2. John Maynard Keynes was born on June 5, 1883, in Cambridge, England. His political, economic, and moral influence continues to affect every American.
3. The Fabian Socialist Society was an offshoot of The Fellowship of the New Life, which was born in October 1883 in London, England.

Today’s financial events illustrate that America is not exempt from being led toward socialism. Predictions differ, depending on one’s perspective, as to whether this will be a socialistic paradise or a socialistic hell. Time will tell. In the meantime, we’d do well to listen to warnings of the past.

Russian thinker and author Fedor Dostoyevsky’s offered the following take on socialism: “The future kingdom of socialism will be a terrible tyranny of criminals and murderers. It will throw humanity into a true hell of spiritual suffering and poverty.”

Socialist George Bernard Shaw added: “You would be forcibly fed, clothed, lodged, taught and employed whether you liked it or not. If it were discovered that you had not character and industry enough to be worth all this trouble, you might possibly be executed in a kindly manner.”

That’s probably why Margaret Thatcher added that the “problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.”

Today, we can link the U. S. House of Representatives-and its radical, progressive, socialistic societies and caucuses-directly to Karl Marx through Keynes and the Fabians.

Before identifying many of the House members caught up in the socialist web, however, let’s first identify the major economic dogma of the early socialists.

Socialism is the economic system of both the Marxist-Leninist worldview and the Fabian Society worldview. John Maynard Keynes was a member of the British Fabian Society, whose American counterparts were the Intercollegiate Socialist Society and the League for Industrial Democracy. Their American voices were centered in the ideas of Norman Thomas and John Dewey among others. Dewey, you may remember, was an early signatory of The Humanist Manifesto (1933) and its atheistic, socialist gospel.

Socialists are united in their desire to see capitalism destroyed, either forcefully or gradually, and most would rejoice if Christianity were destroyed along with it. Socialists and liberals generally see in Christians “an infallible marker of mental retardation.” (Claremont Review of Books, Winter 20008/09, 6).

The Christian worldview endorses sound or hard money, fiscal responsibility, saving for a rainy day, deferred gratification, paying off monthly credit card bills, living within one’s means, etc. Keynesian economics, on the other hand, argues for consumption, extravagance, and not providing for the future, arguing that “the great vice is saving, thrift and financial prudence.” (Keynes At Harvard, 63) Keynesians love huge national spending and debt and high inflation-anathema to Christians and conservatives.

Socialists see capitalism as an evil economic system founded on the concepts of profit, individualism, private property, private business, freedom to buy and sell products and services, etc. Indeed, a working definition of capitalism is “the peaceful and free exchange of goods and services without theft, fraud, and breech of contract.” Capitalism is tailored to individual initiative rather than groupthink or community initiative. Nearly all inventions that have furthered the capitalistic enterprise and blessed humanity in the process have been the result of individual initiative rather than committee, group, or government activity.

Marx advanced the socialist cause by calling for social or public ownership of property and the abolition of private property. He believed that people were best suited to work on state farms, public parks, nationalized banks, or the government bureaucracy rather than for private employers, who would certainly take advantage of their employees, causing them both social and economic harm. Marx was an economic leach on fellow communist Engels, who supported him with his capitalistic father’s monies.

George Bernard Shaw represented the Fabian point of view by calling for “the socialization of the means of production, distribution, and exchange” to bring about an equal distribution of goods and services to all members of society and to make the State “the ALL of social well-being.” The State “subsumes all economic life of the nation.”

In other words, socialism is an economic system that downplays the individual in favor of the group, social order, or the State. It is a system in which the State directs the economic activity of the social order through central planning and by placing economic activity under the jurisdiction of the State. Socialism is also known as collectivism or Statism and to Marx, Communism.

Today, we call this economic system “interventionism” or Keynesism. Interventionism is a kind of socialism or communism, but without the destruction of the bourgeoisie (which were slaughtered by the millions by Soviet and Chinese communists). Today’s Fabians/Progressives/Radicals allow their capitalist enemies to create wealth, but acquire it by taxing them instead of slaughtering them (Marx’s “reign of terrorism on the bourgeoisie”). They are then free to distribute the wealth among the economically disadvantaged, the intellectual elites, and the superior governing classes.

Such (re)distribution of wealth ensures the favorable vote of the masses being fed, entertained, housed (with sub-prime loans) and doctored. ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) and socialism fit hand-in-glove just as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac fit Barney Frank, Maxine Waters, and Chris Dodd to a “T.”

Most Americans are totally unaware that the U.S. House of Representatives crawls with a large, well-organized assembly of socialist organizations. These organizations are dedicated to (a) bringing about the destruction of the capitalist economic system (portrayed as greedy, conservative, religious, and/or filthy rich) and (b) slowly but surely bringing production, education, food, and health care under the complete control and regulation of the federal government.

A prime example of this governmental takeover is the carbon tax currently under discussion. It would punish business and industry’s use of gas and oil products (which according to Al Gore will warm the planet by one degree over the next 100 years) by “allow[ing] the federal government to ‘control every aspect of our economy,’ according to Christopher Horner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute” (The Weekly Standard, March 16, 2009, 17).

The legislators involved in this socialistic undertaking belong to one or more radical House organizations: the Progressive Democrats of America (6 House members), the Congressional Progressive Caucus (74 House members), the Congressional Black Caucus (43 House members), and the Democratic Socialists of America.

Incidentally, the Democratic Socialists of America do not identify their House members since they consider all members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus part of their membership due to the fact that “they both shared operative social democratic politics.” The most prominent national member of DSA is AFL-CIO President John J. Sweeney, who could well be the most powerful influence in the House of Representatives. And for the record, the Chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus is Congressional Progressive Caucus member Barbara Lee (CA-9). The interconnections between all these socialist-based organizations is staggering.

These organizations and their members quite literally comprise a Socialist Red Army within the very contours of the House of Representatives. According to the Wikipedia article on the organization, “The Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) is the single largest partisan caucus in the United States House of Representatives and works together to advance progressive [socialist] issues and causes. The CPC was founded in 1991 by independent [socialist] Congressman Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who remains a member as Senator. [The CPC] represents about a third of the House Democratic Caucus. Of the twenty standing committees of the House, eleven are chaired by members of the CPC.”

When the CPC claimed 64 members in 2006 (now 74 and gaining), the leftist publication boasted, “The largest ideological caucus in the new House Democratic majority will be the Congressional Progressive Caucus, with a membership that includes New York’s Charles Rangel, Michigan’s John Conyers, Massachusetts’s Barney Frank and at least half the incoming chairs of House standing committees” (The Nation, November 12, 2006).

These current eleven chairs are CPC members: George Miller (CA-9)-Chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee; Henry Waxman (CA-30)-Chairman of the Committee on Energy and Commerce; Bob Filner (CA-51)-Chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Committee; Barney Frank (MA-4)-Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee; John Conyers (MI-14)-Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee; Bennie Thompson (MS-2)-Chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee; Nydia Velazquez (NY-12)-Chairwoman of the House Small Business Committee; Charles Rangel (NY-15)-Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee; Louise Slaughter (NY-28)-Chairwoman of the House Rules Committee; Bob Brady (PA-1)-Chairman of the House Administration Committee; and Edward J. Markey (MA-7)-Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming.

As of February 20, 2009, the Co-Chairs of the CPC are Raul M. Grijalva (AZ-7) and Lynn Woolsey (CA-6). The Vice Chairs are Diane Watson (CA-33), Sheila Jackson-Lee (TX-18), Mazie Hirono (HI-2), and Dennis Kucinich (OH-10). Incidentally, the CPC website was “hosted by the Democratic Socialists of America” until 1999, a group affiliated with the Socialist International which was founded by Karl Marx, Saint-Simon, and Fourier!

The Commission for a Sustainable World Society is one of the Socialist International’s sub-organizations. Until President Obama picked Carol M. Browner as his global warming czar, Browner was a member in good standing of the Socialist International. Upon her appointment, her name and biography were removed from its website “though a photo of her speaking June 30 to the group’s congress in Greece was still available” (The Washington Times, January 12, 2009, 1). We can expect Browner to manipulate and push for every piece of socialist legislation to advance the defeat of capitalism and the imposition of more government on the American people. Oil, natural gas, coal, and nuclear energy represent capitalism, and we can expect Congressional socialists to do everything in their legislative power to thwart their discovery, drilling, usage, and distribution. Socialists promote wind(mill) power because they know it alone cannot meet the energy needs of a capitalist economy and will, therefore, hasten the death of capitalism.

Browner will enjoy a great deal of support from the newly appointed Secretary of Labor, Hilda Solis, who is also a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. And when Browner needs further help, she can rely on the committee chairs, co-chairs, and vice chairs listed above to assist her in using the global warming/climate change scare to bring the United States of America into a socialistic world governing body. She can also count on former CPC member Nancy Pelosi (who is already manifesting dictatorial tendencies) to drive the socialist agenda as fast as humanly possible. Pelosi’s San Francisco district (CA-8) is synonymous with socialism/ progressivism/ collectivism/statism/leftism/radicalism that in turn are synonymous with scientific socialism/communism/ Marxism/Leninism/Maoism.

We have yet to address the ideological role played by John Maynard Keynes in the demise of American capitalism and Christian influence. Anyone with a Christian, conservative bent fears the reality that the United States is falling headlong off the cliff into socialism and all that this will entail. It is no secret that the radical left is both anti-capitalist and anti-Christian. Marx would be, no doubt ecstatic, realizing that his life’s work of dethroning God and destroying capitalism are about to be accomplished.

Zygmund Dobbs conducted the research for Keynes at Harvard (available online at Keynes at Harvard) and summarizes the political, moral, and economic slant of Keynes and his friends at Cambridge University: “Singing the Red Flag, the highborn sons of the British upper-class lay on the carpeted floor spinning out socialist schemes in homosexual intermissions . . . .The attitude in such gatherings was anti-establishmentarian. To them the older generation was horribly out of date, even superfluous. The capitalist system was declared obsolete and revolution was proclaimed as the only solution. Christianity was pronounced an enemy force, and the worst sort of depravities were eulogized as ‘that love which passes all Christian understanding.’ Chief of this ring of homosexual revolutionaries was John Maynard Keynes. . . . Keynes was characterized by his male sweetheart, Lytton Strachey, as ‘a liberal and a sodomite, an atheist and a statistician.’ His particular depravity was the sexual abuse of little boys.”

Keynes, like Marx, had a fixation that should have been a clue to his character. Marx practiced phrenology (the study of bumps on one’s head), and Keynes practiced chirognomy (the study of people’s hands). After studying the hands of Charles Darwin’s brother, Sir George, Keynes remarked, “His hands certainly looked as if they might be descended from an ape.”

Overall, Keynes despised free or private enterprise, considered homosexuality superior to heterosexuality, sought to replace the gold standard with fiat paper money which was more easily produced by government printing presses, did not believe in the family unit, despised “savings” as a stumbling block against the march of socialism, called on the state to control the number of children per family.

The Keynesian economic formula fits all totalitarianisms, including Fascism, Nazism, and Communism. Sir Oswald Mosley, for example, was a Fascist leader and a member of the Fabian Society. Lauchlin Currie, a prominent Keynesian advocate, was a Soviet spy and an economic aid to F.D.R. Joan Robinson, a Marxist economist, assisted Keynes in some of his economic writings, arguing, “the differences between Marx and Keynes are only verbal.” (Keynes At Harvard, 68; also see Mark Skousen, The Making of Modern Economics, 433).

Keynes also had a strong relationship with the notorious Soviet spy Harry Dexter White. Keynes considered White to be “the central figure in the Keynesian manipulations in the United States.” Harry Dexter White just happened to be the Assistant to the Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. Even after White was exposed as a Soviet spy, Keynesians to this day “see nothing wrong in White’s Soviet role,” a “typical . . . attitude of Fabian socialist elements toward the whole coterie of spies and Fifth Amendment communists in the United States” (Keynes At Harvard, 83).

And it was Keynes himself who admitted that by “a continuous process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method, they not only confiscate, but confiscate arbitrarily: and while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some [e.g., Al Gore]. The process engages all of the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner that not one man in a million can diagnose.”

Thus it is astounding that Larry Summers, head of President Obama’s National Economic Council and former president of Harvard University, when asked by Charlie Rose “what idea, what person has most influenced your thinking on how to deal with this [financial] mess?” without hesitation answered “Keynes.”

Following the economic advice of Keynes (huge government spending, debt, and inflation) is kissing the American capitalist system goodnight! His advice is what every socialist would give, even though clear-thinking, common sense Americans know that excessive debt and excessive spending are the main ingredients that created this current financial mess (with the help of Congressional Progressives like Barney Frank hatching socialist schemes in the House of Representatives).

When Whittaker Chambers took up his sling and aimed his rock at Communism, he admitted that he hit “something else.” What he hit “was the forces of that great socialist revolution, which, in the name of liberalism, spasmodically, incompletely, somewhat formlessly, but always in the same direction, has been inching its ice cap over the nation for two decades.”

That inching is fast becoming a rout with national and international socialists alike thinking their best opportunity to strike a deathblow to the greatest, freest economic system in all of human history is now.

Because capitalism has raised more human beings out of poverty than all other economic systems combined, we should remember the wisdom of Robert Heilbroner, a former Marxist economist who changed his position before the fall of the Berlin Wall: “The Soviet Union, China, and Eastern Europe have given us the clearest possible proof that capitalism organizes the material affairs of humankind more satisfactorily than socialism: that however inequitably or irresponsibly the marketplace may distribute goods, it does so better than the queues of a planned economy; however mindless the culture of commercialism, it is more attractive than state moralism; and however deceptive the ideology of a business civilization, it is more believable than that of a socialist one.”

Little wonder that Winston Churchill painted socialism as a philosophy of failure, a creed of ignorance, and a gospel of envy whose inherent virtue “is the equal sharing of misery.”

Public Schools Got Religion (Not The One You Think)

Those Loathsome Christian Gift Boxes.

What could be worse than including a Gospel booklet in gift packages for needy children? Nothing—at least to some parents of Stratton Elementary School children in Colorado Springs.

The fourth graders at Stratton Elementary wanted to participate in a holiday class project that would help children less fortunate than themselves. They joined in a project that does just that—filling shoeboxes with personal items, toys, school supplies, etc., and then shipping them all over the world to needy children in time for Christmas. The project was suddenly canceled, however, when a parent discovered that it was part of Samaritan’s Purse Operation Christmas Child. The outrage stemmed from the fact that Samaritan’s Purse is an evangelical Christian organization, and each gift box would include a Gospel booklet translated into the language of the child recipient.

How dare some Christian parent of one of the fourth graders suggest such a project? After all, this is an American public school, and American public schools do not support religion!

A better question to ask, though, is how dare Read more