I've been wrong about Obama

It is time for me to do something that I’m sure many will find surprising. I’ve been wrong about Obama. Please forgive me. (See helpful links behind Headline)

I have to admit it. After a lot of soul searching and internal debate, I have come to the conclusion that I have been incorrect and inappropriate when assigning motives to his actions and now I see the logic. I really have been way off base. I was wrong to assign motives to his policies based on my own narrow and ignorant views and experiences.

Am I turning into a liberal? Not a chance.

As most of the readers here have seen, I have written a lot about energy and energy policy because my career is in the oil and gas sector, primarily the deepwater/subsea end. I have been particularly critical of the president and his administration for the dire situation of the industry in my home market, the Gulf of Mexico, and I have ascribed Obama’s motives to attempt to strangle this domestic industry to his ties to the leftist environmental lobby. When viewed from this narrow perspective, this makes sense. Why else, in the age of $5 a gallon gasoline, would he turn his back on a critical industry?

The reason that my conclusion was ignorant was that my view was far too narrow. This isn’t about environmentalism; it is about Obama being a Marxist.

I’ve been bothered to no end by the contradictions in his actions. The Gulf of Mexico deepwater industry has been (and continues to be) strangled for a year by a drilling ban and then the subsequent “permitorium” (the refusal to issue permits even after the ban was lifted to domestic companies), yet we see actions like these:

Obama Underwrites Offshore Drilling (August 2009)

You read that headline correctly. Unfortunately, the Obama Administration is financing oil exploration off Brazil.

The U.S. is going to lend billions (2 billion to be exact. Ed.) of dollars to Brazil’s state-owned oil company, Petrobras, to finance exploration of the huge offshore discovery in Brazil’s Tupi oil field in the Santos Basin near Rio de Janeiro. Brazil’s planning minister confirmed that White House National Security Adviser James Jones met this month with Brazilian officials to talk about the loan.

Obama promises to buy the oil from Brazil that we financed:

“We want to help you with the technology and support to develop these oil reserves safely. And when you’re ready to start selling, we want to be one of your best customers. At a time when we’ve been reminded how easily instability in other parts of the world can affect the price of oil, the United States could not be happier with the potential for a new, stable source of energy.” – White House Press Briefing, March 19th

So what, right? Since we import oil anyway, what’s wrong with helping develop foreign sources? Let’s look a little deeper.

Look at Venezuela, second only to Saudi as an OPEC import partner:
In February of 2007 Hugo Chavez signed a decree to nationalize the oil industry in the world’s fifth-largest crude oil exporter. Candidate Obama stated that he would cut oil imports 30%, including oil from Venezuela.
In 2009, President Barack Obama, while attending the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad, fulfilled one of his more ill considered campaign promises, talking to dictators without precondition. Smiling, he shook hands with Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez.
In June of 2010, Chavez nationalized the assets of an American company:

Venezuela seizes 11 oil rigs owned by Helmerich and Payne, a Tulsa, Oklahoma based company, because it refused to start up drilling operations for not being paid $100 million owed them by PSVSA, the state run oil operator.
In December of 2010, the Chavez regime aligned itself with Iran and has been violating UN sanctions on Iran by shipping refined gasoline to them.

What has the administration done? Nothing of substance – a lot of talk and some harshly worded letters (reminds me of Team America: World Police). Why aren’t we doing anything? CITGO is the national oil company of Venezuela and it operates in the US, yet we continue to send money to Chavez on both the wholesale and the retail end.

To answer that, we have to look at Obama and his true motives. This situation is being used covertly to achieve one of his Marxist goals, and that is to redistribute American wealth to his fellow socialist/Marxist friends.

When you look at Obama’s “Apology Tour”, his inability to express a belief in American exceptionalism, his foreign policies designed to strip the US of its traditional global leadership position and make us “one of many” nations (nothing special, just one of the boys) and his domestic policies designed to disadvantage industries that have been the historical drivers behind American supremacy, the picture starts to come into focus.

One of the primary charges that the Left around the world is that America’s prosperity is derived from America taking advantage of the rest of the world – we rape the Third World to advantage our own people. Everybody has heard the old saw that “America has 2% of the world’s oil reserves and yet uses 25% of the oil”.

Obama shares this view.

The people who state this ignore that America is nearly 30% of the world’s economy and is the largest trading partner with counties in the developed world – so it’s not like we are pouring the oil down a well or hoarding it, we are returning value to the world market as a result of it.

Obama is a child of the Left. He grew up in a radical family (in the sense that it was 180 degrees opposed to a traditional American family). He grew up with a mother who was considered a radical, even in a time when radicalism was in vogue. She was brought up in the radicalized environment of the Seattle coffee house scene (not quite Starbucks). He grew up at the askance of others, his family living off welfare and subsidies as his mother pursued a Ph.D. and studied blacksmithing in Indonesia. In his own words:

I wasn’t born wealthy. I was raised by a single mom and my grandparents. I went to college on scholarships. There was a time when my mom was trying to get her Ph.D. where, for a short time, she had to take food stamps. My grandparents relied on Medicare and Social Security.

Obama’s grandfather sought out Frank Marshall Davis, a “community activist” (labor agitator) and member of the Communist Party USA to tutor young Barack. According to Accuracy in Media:

The record shows that Obama was in Hawaii from 1971-1979, where, at some point in time, he developed a close relationship, almost like a son, with Davis, listening to his “poetry” and getting advice on his career path. But Obama, in his book, Dreams From My Father, refers to him repeatedly as just “Frank.”

Obama’s college associates and classmates have opined about his radicalism and true nature. In 2008, a classmate at Columbia, Wayne Allen Root told Reason that:

“A vote for Obama is four years of Karl Marx, and no one should be happy about that. He’s a communist! I don’t care what anybody says. The guy’s a communist…. And his mother was a card-carrying communist, and he says she’s the most important person in his entire life; he learned everything from her.”

Dr. John C. Drew, a grant writing consultant in Laguna Niguel, Calif., in a 2010 interview with Newsmax, tells Ronald Kessler that he met Obama in 1980 when Obama was a sophomore at Occidental College in Los Angeles. Drew had just graduated from Occidental and was attending graduate school at Cornell University.

Drew’s then girlfriend, Caroline Boss — now Grauman-Boss — knew Obama because she shared classes with him at Occidental. During Christmas break, Drew says he was at Grauman-Boss’ home in Palo Alto when Obama came over with Mohammed Hasan Chandoo, his roommate from Pakistan.

“Barack and Hasan showed up at the house in a BMW, and then we went to a restaurant together,” Drew says. “We had a nice meal, and then we came back to the house and smoked cigarettes and drank and argued politics.” For the next several hours, they discussed Marxism.

“He was arguing a straightforward Marxist-Leninist class-struggle point of view, which anticipated that there would be a revolution of the working class, led by revolutionaries, who would overthrow the capitalist system and institute a new socialist government that would redistribute the wealth,” says Drew, who says he himself was then a Marxist.

“The idea was basically that wealthy people were exploiting others,” Drew says. “That this was the secret of their wealth, that they weren’t paying others enough for their work, and they were using and taking advantage of other people. He was convinced that a revolution would take place, and it would be a good thing.”

Drew concluded that Obama thought of himself as “part of an intelligent, radical vanguard that was leading the way towards this revolution and towards this new society.”

Obama’s early Chicago political career included flirtations with the New Party, even to the point of seeking and receiving an endorsement from them. The New Party was a Marxist political coalition whose objective was to endorse and elect leftist public officials — most often Democrats. The New Party’s short-term objective was to move the Democratic Party leftward, thereby setting the stage for the eventual rise of new Marxist third party.

Co-founded in 1992 by Daniel Cantor (a former staffer for Jesse Jackson‘s 1988 presidential campaign) and Joel Rogers, the New Party (NP) was a socialist political coalition whose objective was to endorse and elect leftist public officials – most often Democrats. Cantor and Rogers wanted NP to be “an explicitly social democratic organization, with an ideology roughly like that of Northern European (e.g., Swedish) labor movements.” NP’s short-term objective was to move the Democratic Party leftward, thereby setting the stage for the eventual rise of a new socialist third party. According to author Stanley Kurtz, NP “is best understood as an attempt to build a mass-based political front for a largely socialist party leadership.” Around the time of NP’s founding, Joel Rogers himself penned a piece in the Marxist journal New Left Review, wherein he made it clear that the organization was a socialist enterprise at its core.

In the fall of 1994, a New Party publication listed more than 100 activists “who are building the NP.” Of these, twelve were affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), six with the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, five with ACORN, and fourteen with IPS. Notable names among the list of 100+ were John Cavanagh, Noam Chomsky, Barbara Ehrenreich, Randall Forsberg, Maude Hurd, Manning Marable, Frances Fox Piven, Zach Polett, Wade Rathke, Mark Ritchie, Joel Rogers, Gloria Steinem, Cornel West, Quentin Young, and Howard Zinn.

The New Party’s influential Chicago chapter began to coalesce in January 1995. Its members consisted mainly of individuals associated with ACORN, DSA, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), and the Committees of Correspondence.

NP’s modus operandi featured the political strategy of “electoral fusion,” where it would nominate, for various political offices, candidates from other parties (usually Democrats), thereby enabling each of those candidates to occupy more than one ballot line in the voting booth. By so doing, NP often was able to influence candidates’ political platforms. (Fusion of this type is today permitted in eight states — Connecticut, Delaware, Idaho, Mississippi, New York, Oregon, South Carolina, and Vermont — but is common only in New York.) NP’s overriding goal was to elect leftist Democrats rather than third-party candidates, as evidenced by a 1994 New Party Executive Committee announcement that said: “Joining the New Party doesn’t end your relationship with the Democrats, it changes it.”

Being a child of the Left, and growing into a man of the Left, it is entirely consistent for Obama to collaborate with the likes of the radical leadership in Brazil and Venezuela to redistribute wealth from the “evil” capitalism of the USA to the benevolent socialist Utopias of those countries. Hugo Chavez has made his Marxist bone fides clear via several years for nationalization of industry, government control of media and food production and his alliances with other totalitarian regimes around the world.

As far as Brazil, I’ll let the conservative rag/Republican house organ, the Los Angeles Times, speak to that:

Accepting the green and yellow mantle of power from her immensely popular mentor, former Marxist guerrilla Dilma Rousseff was sworn in Saturday as Brazil’s first female president and faced two immediate tasks: keeping the booming economy on track and fleshing out Brazil’s developing role on the world stage.

Rousseff’s personal history reads like a graphic novel of Marxist activism…and by “Marxist guerrilla”, the LA Times means that she participated in the militant activities of the Comando de Libertação Nacional—COLINA (English: National Liberation Command) and advocated Marxist politics among labor union members. This little club was primarily known for a handful of bank robberies and stolen cars until a police raid led to the death of 2 policemen.

Obama agrees and shares policy positions with these two Marxist leaders. He envies the policies of Chavez, longing to do what Chavez has done (Democrats Maxine Waters, Maurice Hinchey and Ed Markey have all called for nationalization of the oil industry), fortunately our elective form of government has prevented a “full Hugo” and has a least limited BHO to “Marx Lite”. You know that he must envy the street cred of Comrade Rousseff compared to his dilettante background. Shew actually did the “Marxist struggle/violent insurrection” thing.

I was wrong. This isn’t about the evil oil industry at all; it is about punishing capitalist America and putting us on a path to a redistributionist and Marxist future.