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Lessons From Fallen Civilizations:

Can a Bankrupt America Survive the Current Islamic Threat?

by Larry Kelley

ISBN 978-1-936449-09-5 (hardcover)

7 out of 10 people say America is in decline! Why?

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I covered Oakland’s occupation march and shut-down for Townhall.com. My deadline was noon the following day. I’ve never had such a tight deadline. But I got it done. This is my take on the state of our endangered Republic.

It was a good day for the 99% movement.

Oakland Mayor, Jean Quan

In attending the occupation of Oakland, I was struck by how the American Left has coalesced around the advocacy of Saul Alinsky, a man that 99% of the so called 99%ers have doubtlessly never heard of. In the 1930’s Alinsky created the “crisis strategy” which prescribed flooding well-fare rolls in order to bankrupt cities.

David Horowitz has led the country in detailing how it was the Alinsky model which profoundly influenced Barack Obama and gave birth to vast “shake-down” organizations such as ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now). But even more importantly, he points out it was Alinsky, though not a communist, that united the various socialists, anarchists, union workers, the disadvantaged and disaffected into a nihilist common cause—the seizure of power… (whole article at Townhall.com)

In the wake of the first ever Tunisian elections, it is worth reflecting upon the Athenians of the fifth century BC who first conceived of a system of governance where the many would rule the few, and worth considering that it was the Romans who refined the concept of democracy with the construction of their republic. But it was the democratic republic of America’s founders which was further refined and profoundly influenced by Judeo/Christian principles. As David Goldman writes in

While westerners hope that the elections in Tunisia are a harbinger of a great new Islamic awakening, the notions that an all-powerful Allah would constrain his powers and extend inalienable rights to mankind, including women and especially non Muslims, are antithetical to Muslim orthodoxy. Tunisia’s new majority party, Nahda, proclaims that it is both democratic and Islamist and that it will enact laws inspired by Sharia law. But Islam does not provide for individual or minority rights. Moreover, where Muslim culture predominates, freedoms of worship and expression do not exist.

The great worry for the West is that the pledge made by the new Islamist majority in Tunisia is the perpetual double game, based on taqiyya, a core tenant of Islam, which proscribes lying to the infidel in order to advance Islamic world domination. The Wall Street Journal’s, Mathew Kaminski quotes Sami Kallel, a Tunisian 50-year-old orthopedic surgeon, “But the fear is the double discourse.” By this Dr. Kallel means that he fears that the new Tunisian power brokers will be no different than the terrorist running Hamas in Gaza who were democratically elected but who are not giving up power through elections any time soon. The fear is that new Arab democracy sweeping the Middle East may only mean—one vote for man one time. It may mean that we have watched secular dictators with whom America had learned to negotiate overthrown by Islamist regimes which will soon be bristling for war with our only ally in the region, Israel.

As it pertains to installing a democracy now that Islamists have gained control of Egypt, Tunisia and Libya, the problem is the Koran. Their revealed word of God proscribes the execution of apostates (those who leave Islam) and homosexuals and wife beating for disobedient spouses. These and other troubling tenants of Islam cause the self-described Islamists to crash up against a modern democracy which is now inextricably defined by Judeo/Christian values. The capacity of western civilization to extend freedoms and dignity to all its citizens, expose Islam for what it is—the pitiless creed of a primitive warrior cult.

Islamists have wrested control of three North Africa nations. Yet they cannot escape the realization that they have lost the ideological war with the West. And it is this that makes them so dangerous. Islamists fill their ranks with lone suicide bombers who attack Iraqi police stations, Egyptian mobs who are now free to burn down Coptic Christian churches, and Iranian officials who threaten Israel with nuclear attack. Despite the Islamist revolutions, Islam may nevertheless coalesce in an all out suicide attack on the West for no other reason than to avoid further humiliation as their once great religious civilization disintegrates in the face of superior western values.

The Flea Partiers don’t occupy they infest

I’m protesting with the occupiers of Wall Street. And I believe that Obama needs to stop pussyfooting around with trying to raise taxes on income. That’s chicken feed. For the sake of fairness, he needs to go after wealth that exists. He needs to appoint a new fairness czar and create a new agency to define the proper amount of wealth that people will be allowed to retain. The president needs to draw a line just like we do with tax rates. Above a given net worth, he needs to tell the American public—what more do you and your family need?

Obama needs to stop being so damn chummy with hoarders like Mark Zukerberg at Facebook who is purported to be worth about $17 billion but who employs relatively few people.  The agency should set up a shop inside Facebook tasked with diverting Zukerberg’s money into clean energy projects and into the repair of our infrastructure.  The Agency needs to go after John Kerry who is hoarding about a billion dollars of Teresa “shove it” Hines’ money which was clearly ill-gotten. Kerry did nothing to earn it. He just married it. Moreover, it was amassed by Hines’ ketchup-magnate husband who underpaid his factory workers and donated money to the Republican Party.

Obama’s new czar needs to go after the Pelosi family which owns a couple dozen restaurants all staffed by underpaid employees. They should be unionized immediately from the busboys to the mangers. And second mortgages need taken out on all Pelosi properties so that funds can be freed up to provide broader services for the immigrant population of her district. And there’s Robert Redford. He owns an entire ski resort staffed by underpaid, non-unionized workers. He needs to get his mind right, set an example for all the hoarders, and voluntarily send in a big check to the treasury.

And then, in California, there are all the graduates of UC Berkeley, Stanford and few other privileged universities who are holding down cushy, high-paying jobs. These people are hoarders of the first degree because they got their positions because of their belonging to their special elitist club. The confiscation of their wealth should be sent these universities so that tuition can free and available to anyone who wants to attend. It’s long past time that we looked at higher education as a basic human right.

Finally, we agree with the Muslim jihadists, “What’s ours is ours. What’s yours is ours.”

Regardless of what the Federal Reserve does now, soon the demand for American debt will wane. The world is rapidly seeing us as less than credit worthy and a declining power. In order for the US to attract buyers for our riskier debt, interest rates are soon to spike, making our cost of government soar from $3.7 trillion to even far more unaffordable levels.

Whether Congress agrees to raise the debt ceiling or not, absent a massive reduction in federal spending, the United States government is soon going to be unable to meet payroll and its massive other obligations. Once he is unable to count on hundreds of billions fiat money, Obama will not cut the new employees he’s hired since inaugurated in 2009, the thousands of new apparatchiks at the EPA, Energy Department, HHS, and the IRS.

He will move to close down national parks and suspend social security payments. He will move to inflict the greatest amount of pain on the American public possible. Amidst the resulting downward economic spiral and chaos, what could arise is the very real danger that our ability to fund military and intelligence operations could be interrupted, leaving us unable to actively interdict rogue plots aimed at our overseas troops and assets as well as American cities. Moreover, it might well signal to enemies such as Iran, North Korea and possibly even China, that the time to strike has arrived.

The Judeo Christian West has certainly been at war with major elements of Islam almost unceasingly over the past 14 centuries. For example, in June of 1683, 500,000 soldiers of the Islamic Ottoman Empire encamped outside Vienna and began siege operations against the capital of the Hapsburg Empire. Had not Christian armies from Poland and surrounding duchies not come to Vienna’s rescue and defeated the Ottomans on September 11, 1683, (the anniversary selected by bin Laden for the attacks on America) the fall of Western Civilization would have been at hand. For the long and horrible summer of 1683, while Islamic cannons pounded the walls of their city, the starving inhabitants of Vienna had little doubt that they were at war with the soldiers of Allah.

Just days after the hit on bin Laden, two American Islamists were arrested in New York as they purchased weapons from undercover FBI agents on their way to attack Manhattan synagogues. Yet this president continues to go to extraordinary lengths, in various venues here and in the Middle East, to assert that the murder of Americans by jihadists in New York, the Pentagon, Fort Hood, Bagdad, or Kabul has nothing to do with Islam. But Major Hassan, the Fort Hood shooter, the Nigerian who tried to blow up the Northwest flight 253 over Detroit and the Pakistani-born naturalized American citizen who almost turned Times Square into a smoldering crater, all professed their dedication to pure Islam. Dutifully, Obama’s loyal Attorney General, Eric Holder, in testimony before Congress, refused to make any connection between Muslim attacks on the West and any religious belief.

More and more, Americans are not buying the President’s pitch, given that there isn’t any reciprocity emanating from the rulers of the Islamic world. Americans are now fully aware that denunciations of Muslim terror attacks against the West by influential Islamic clerics, scholars and heads of state have been muted, ambivalent and painfully few. We are aware that simply because President Obama declares that we are not at war with Islam does not preclude the possibility that Islam is at war with us. The evidence for this possibility continues to mount first of all because there is this unimpeachable fact—while not all Muslims are terrorists, almost all terrorists are Muslim.

Then there is the problem of the Quran. Children throughout the Muslim world learn from an early age that the Koran divides the world into two realms, dar al Islam (the house of Islam) and dar al harb (the house of war). Despite the apologist efforts of our president, we can understand the obvious distinction between description and invocation in religious texts. While the Torah or the Old Testament might describe military victories over various enemies in the distant past, it is quite another phenomenon when the Quran, which all Muslims believe is the literal word of God, invokes the believers to—Slay the unbelievers wherever you find them. There is no similar invocation in any Jewish or Christian religious texts. Moreover, nearly all the Muslim terrorists captured on the battlefields of Iran or Afghanistan or inside the U.S. freely admit that they are acting in obedience to their religious doctrine.

Then there is the problem of Israel. Polling conducted throughout Islamic world reveals that an extremely high percentage of Muslims have a deep hatred for Jews and do not believe that Israel has a right to exist. The Iranian regime which actively calls for the destruction of Israel, refers to it as “little Satan” and to the U.S. as the “Great Satan.” If most Muslims favor the war to destroy Israel, given that the United States is the primary benefactor of Israel, are we Americans not their enemy as well?

Then there was the gang rape in Cairo of the CBS reporter, Lara Logan, by the supposed democracy loving Egyptian freedom fighters. On February 11, 2011, on the night that Egyptian President Mubarak resigned, Ms. Logan and her camera crew walked toward Tahrir Square amid thousands of jubilant Egyptians. All went well until the battery powering her cameraman’s floodlight went out. Immediately a cloud of over 100 rapists descended upon her, tearing all her clothes off and manually and conventionally raping her in all orifices while others filmed the event on the cell phones and yelled, “Jew, Jew, American bitch.”

After several months of rehabilitation, Ms. Logan’s appearance on the 60 Minutes broadcast was aired on May 1, 2011 but was eclipsed by Obama’s announcement of the bin Laden assassination. She said, “For an extended period of time, they raped me but what really struck me was how merciless they were. They really enjoyed my pain and suffering. It incited them.” She felt that she would ultimately be killed but the moving cloud rapists and voyeurs spilled up against a fence where a group of shrouded Islamic women were sitting and who were able to cover her with their bodies until some soldiers could rescue her.

What 60 Minutes could not bring itself to conclude was that the massive gang rape of Ms. Logan, involving several hundred rapists and voyeurs could not have occurred in a major or lesser western city, not in London, Madrid, Paris, New York, Dallas, or Tupelo. It’s obvious that men brought up in the Judeo/Christian West would have come to Ms. Logan’s rescue if they saw her in the grip of group of thuggish rapists. Not so for the female infidel in the newly liberated Cairo. For the western observer of Ms. Logan’s rape not conflicted by multicultural political correctness, the implications were and are obvious.

Liberal progressive politicians and policies have destroyed the black community and family—and no where is this more evident than in Oakland. The damage done has devastated the once-great city.

Original Article in April 2011 Townhall Magazine (pdf)

Thucydides, our primary source for the 27-year Greek civil war we call the Peloponnesian War, portrayed Athens, his home city, conquered by Sparta, as a tragic hero possessed of both greatness yet fatal flaws.

Oakland, which occupies one of the most spectacular bucolic sites on the planet, is a city suffering much the way Athens did—plagued by the catastrophic unintended consequences of the democratic process, which in Oakland has delivered a radical, left-wing one-party rule. A tragic sinister aura always lurks just beneath the seemingly idyllic surface. Despite its picturesque environment and perfect weather pattern, it is among the most dangerous cities in America.

Sometime after the last ice age had reached its zenith 13,000 years ago, nomadic hunter/gatherers began inhabiting the incredibly gamerich temperate lands of what is today the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay. As Malcolm Margolin writes in his account of Oakland’s prehistoric Native Americans, “The Ohlone Way,” the earliest seafaring explorers, no matter how well traveled, were awestruck by the plentitude of wildlife living there. Vast herds of elk—“monsters with tremendous horns”—grazed the massive meadowlands along with huge herds of pronghorn antelope. Packs of wolves hunted them along with mountain lions, bobcats and coyotes. The bay was so dense with whales that it was common to see one beached surrounded by herds of grizzly bears gorging themselves.

The natives living in the area, the Ohlone, were a collection of 40 disunited tribes living from what is today Berkeley and Oakland south to San Jose and Monterrey. So plentiful was the game, edible plants and fierce man-eating predators, tribes living just 20 miles apart travelled so little that they each developed their own distinct language. And consequently, they did not find the need to discover metallurgy or agriculture or even a word for war.

During the late-18th and early-19th century, the ruling Spaniards herded the docile natives into missions, where the vast majority promptly died of infectious diseases or grief. In their defense, it never occurred to the Spanish missionaries that their charges would never show any interest in becoming members of Western Christendom. Those Ohlones who did not die of disease lived out their lives as stable boys or maids but were so wretchedly saddened by the loss of their beloved tribal life of plenty that they failed to marry and procreate. The cruelty visited upon Oakland’s natives would just be the beginning of the ultimate tragedy that would come to define the troubled land.

GOLD BOOM

With the start of the gold rush in 1849, the city became a boomtown. During the 1850s, for those who had made the 20,000-mile voyage around Cape Horn, Oakland was their jumping-off point before heading up into the gold fields of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Oakland’s first entrepreneurs made fortunes provisioning the hoards of miners and job seekers. Six years before the completion of the transcontinental railroad, Mark Twain made the trip by stagecoach from Saint Joseph, Mo., stopping in Oakland on his way to observe and memorialize the Wild West. In his American classic “Roughing It,” he would write of Oakland: “It was the only population of the kind the world has ever seen gathered together. … They fairly reveled in gold, whiskey, fights and fandangos, and were unspeakably happy.”

The city boomed again when the transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869. Suddenly it became the terminus for all east-west rail travel, the final rail stop before travelers completed their final leg by ferry headed to the fabled San Francisco.

By 1870, wrote Barbara Bagwell in “Oakland: The Story of a City,” Oakland was the most diverse city in the country, a temporary home to miners and adventurers not just from the U.S. but from around the world, home to Asians who had originally come to work on the railroad, and home to African-Americans, many former slaves, who worked as porters for the Pullman Company. The invention of the Pullman car, which could be converted from seating to sleeping quarters, made long-distance rail travel comfortable and immensely popular.

To Pullman’s credit, in the first decades after the Civil War, it hired African-Americans to be porters in large numbers, providing black men with the best wage available to them anywhere in America. Due to the lower cost of living at the western end of the line and Oakland’s social freedom—nearly 100 years before the passage of the Civil Rights Act—blacks were unfettered, able to buy homes, acquire wealth and achieve civic prestige in Oakland.

While Oakland remains one of the nation’s most diverse cities, the radical Left has succeeded in almost destroying the black community and families—driving Oakland to near ruin.

OAKLAND’S FIRST RADICAL

Born in 1876, the illegitimate son of Flora Wellman, Jack London would achieve worldwide stature for his novels and adventure stories and become one of America’s most iconic writers. While sporadically attending Oakland’s public schools, London spent a number of years toiling 12 hours a day as a child laborer in its factories. In the 1880s and ’90s, in the era of the robber barons, not only was there no safety net, there were no laws protecting children from what amounted to parent-sponsored indentured servitude. The misery of that existence not only fueled his passion to escape poverty through his brilliant writing, but it also led to his becoming one of the world’s leading voices advocating violent Marxist revolution.

By 1904, with worldwide accolades pouring in from his publication of “The Call of the Wild,” he was elected president of Intercollegiate Socialist Society. This brought him invitations to address “silk stocking” audiences where he would shock them: “We are an army of 7 million. The cry of this army is ‘No quarter! We want all you
possess. We will be content with nothing less.’” At this time, there was also a speaker’s corner one block from Oakland’s city hall where London often could be found exhorting Oaklanders to embrace his own brand of revolutionary “social Darwinism.”

London died Nov. 22, 1916. A decade after the Bolshevik’s conquered Russia, the Soviet Union would proclaim him a national hero of the Revolution and declare the date a day of mourning.

Early on, the revolutionary Left became a permanent fixture with deep historic roots in Oakland.

THE POLITICAL ESTABLISHMENT
MERGES WITH THE CRIMINAL UNDERWORLD

During the 1970s, Communist-radical-turned-conservative-author David Horowitz witnessed up close the moment the most senior members of the Oakland political Left made common cause with the violent criminal underworld of the Black Panthers.

In his book, Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes, he records that his involvement with the Oakland-based Panthers began in 1973. That year, he was in California raising money for a new flagship magazine of the Left, Ramparts, when he was introduced to Black Panther co-founder Huey Newton.

“Huey’s attraction to the Left had always been his persona as ‘Minister of Defense’ of the Black Panther Party, his challenge to revolutionary wannabees to live up to their rhetoric and ‘pick up’ the gun,” Horowitz writes. “Unlike Elaine [Brown, Newton’s eventual successor], he was able to keep his street passions in check in the presence of white intellectuals he intended to use.”

Based on his initial meeting with a charismatic Newton, Horowitz admits to being duped into staying in Oakland to help raise money to buy a Baptist Church in the ghetto in order to form a Panther elementary school. Shortly thereafter, due to his success at raising sufficient funds to purchase the building, Horowitz found himself firmly embedded in the Panther’s inner circle. It would be a life-changing experience, one that could well have cost him his life.

But before the new “Oakland Community Learning Center” would open, Newton—who had his own problems associated with a drive-by shooting, a brawl with two Oakland cops and his failure to appear at an arraignment for the murder of a white 17-year-old prostitute—fled to Cuba. Newton’s departure left the command of the Panthers to Brown, whom Horowitz describes as an extremely hard-edged and menacing political gangster. “I will never forget standing next to Elaine as she threatened KQED-TV host Bill Schechner over the telephone,” he writes. “‘I will kill you motherf—-r,’ she promised him, if he went through with plans to interview the former Panther Chairman Bobby Seale.”

By its opening, Brown had recruited to the board of the Panther’s learning center a who’s who of Oakland’s political dignitaries, including the city’s first African-American mayor, Lionel Wilson, and the CEO of Clorox. While they were running a crime syndicate, selling drugs and running protection rackets, shaking down afterhours clubs and murdering owners who refused to pay, Brown was able to mainstream the Panthers with the elite of the Oakland Democratic Party and its supporters—those who commanded all the levers of power in Oakland and still do.

Horowitz would later discover that the learning center was but a front, a mechanism the Panther leaders used to divert large sums of money from government grants and charitable donations— primarily from prominent white leftists—in order to hire gunmen and to keep them in fancy cars and clothes and drugs and, “when necessary, out of jail.”

When the Panther treasurer fled the organization, Horowitz recommended the bookkeeper at the learning center, Betty Van Patter, fill the position. This was his last act of assistance to the Panthers and to the cause of the American Left. Shortly thereafter, there was a fatal shooting of a Panther named Deacon at a dance held at the learning center. The shooting had been over drugs the party was dealing out of the school. On the night after Deacon’s funeral, a Panther walked into the Berkeley Square, a neighborhood bar, and handed Van Patter a note. She left and was never seen alive again. Her mistake was that she asked too many questions and knew too much.

Five weeks later her body washed up on the Oakland side of the bay. Horowitz contends, “Everything I knew about the party and the way it worked, led me to believe that Elaine Brown had given the order to have her killed. Betty’s murder shattered my life and changed it forever.”

The press made nothing of the murder. The Oakland Police told Horowitz, “You guys have been cutting our balls off for 10 years. You destroy the police and then you expect them to solve the murders of your friends?”

While the investigation of Van Patter’s death continued to amount to nothing. Brown ran for the Oakland City Council and received 44 percent of Oakland’s vote. A year later, then-Gov. Jerry Brown (also California’s current governor and former mayor of Oakland) sought out her endorsement for his presidential run and made her one of his delegates to the Democrat Convention in 1976.

As Horowitz summarizes his experience as a member of Oakland’s political underworld, Oakland’s white Leftists in the press and in the voting public would forever pardon the likes of Newton, Elaine Brown and the Panthers. They chose to see it as part of their righteous struggle against repression perpetrated by the FBI and the racism so endemic to American society. The establishment Left looked the other way even when the Panthers murdered a woman working for the cause.

OAKLAND’S ONE-PARTY RADICAL RULE

In Oakland, few Republicans ever even run for elective office. And from a fiscal point of view, Oakland is a microcosm of California’s Democratic one-party rule. The state struggles to cope with a $25 billion deficit. Oakland recently laid off 80 police officers, among other across the board cuts, in order to deal with its $50 million budget shortfall. According to the city administrator’s website, Oakland’s revenues have been devastated by the “housing crash” and the “tens of thousands of Oaklanders unemployed.”

The Wall Street Journal reported that, for the month of September 2010, California led all other states with 63,500 job losses and was way out in front of second-place New York with 37,600 lost jobs. Walking down Broadway, the central boulevard in downtown Oakland, one cannot avoid noticing the numbers of vacant large
buildings facing the street.

And for the past 40 years, while one-party rule has presided over the decimation of its once prosperous African-American families, Ron Dellums and his former assistant, Barbara Lee, have been the only two representatives sent to Congress from California’s 9th Congressional District, serving Oakland. Dellums, the man who once
vowed to “take the CIA apart brick by brick,” was elected to Congress in 1970 and served continuously until 1998 when Lee—who, reports Horowitz, got her start in Oakland’s political underworld as the onetime confidential aide to Huey Newton—succeeded him.

In 1981, as chair of the subcommittee on Military Installations, Dellums went on his own fact-fi nding mission to Grenada to determine if the airstrip the Cubans and Russians were building there was being developed for military use. He returned to falsely assure Congress that it was not.

Both Dellums and Lee colluded with communist Grenada dictator Maurice Bishop in an attempt to cover up the fact that the Soviet Union was, in fact, building a military airport there. Even Wikipedia records that documents liberated from Grenada demonstrate that Dellums did commit what was arguably a treasonous act while serving as Oakland’s congressional representative. The documents also reveal that Lee was his messenger.
As long as Oakland continues to elect people like Dellums and Lee, hope for the region remains small.

DESTROYED FAMILIES—DESTROYED LIVES

Jack Cashill observed in his groundbreaking book, “What’s the Matter with California?,” that no matter how liberal you are, you can’t excuse or construct an argument to rationalize murder. Yet on Jan. 1 of this year, the Oakland Tribune made an easily discredited attempt to do just that by lauding the fact that the city’s murders in 2010 dipped to 95, a 15 percent drop from 2009. However, this was merely subterfuge and wishful thinking, because, according to the paper, the incidents of aggravated assault with a firearm in 2010 rose by 28 percent to 900 from 700 in 2009. Either the marksmanship of Oakland’s shooters had precipitously dropped off last year or the doctors at Highland Hospital had made some medical breakthroughs in treating gunshot wounds.

In 2009, Oakland’s homicide rate was 24.5 per 100,000 residents. The five-year average for homicide victims in Oakland, by ethnicity, breaks down as follows:

• 77 percent black,
• 15.4 percent Hispanic,
• 3.2 percent white,
• 2.8 percent Asian and
• 1.6 percent unknown.

The five-year average for homicide suspects in Oakland is:

• 64.7 percent black,
• 8.6 percent Hispanic,
• 0.2 percent white,
• 2 percent Asian and
• 24.4 percent unknown.

The numbers paint a bleak portrait—young blacks killing each other.

The Tribune did report, however, on Feb. 1: “Oakland, a bastion of proud black history, is also an epicenter of its fragmentation. According to a study released this week by the Violence Policy Center in Washington, D.C., Alameda County is the second-deadliest county in California per capita for youths ages 10 to 24, trailing only Monterey County. This is particularly true for young African-American men, who are 14 times as likely as their white counterparts to die violent deaths, most often by handgun.”

So what happened?

In Cashill’s research, he hit upon a primary cause for the state’s negative phenomenon: fatherlessness. And few cities show the impact of this trend more than Oakland.

For the pathologies currently afflicting Oakland’s black community, the trigger was Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. For several generations in Oakland, with various forms of assistance, the state has financed, promoted and exponentially spread the catastrophic unintended consequences—crime, poverty, illiteracy and more—associated with unwed motherhood. Studies and common sense confirm that there is no clearer connection to a life of crime than being born to a semi-literate, poor, single mother.

Oakland was once the home to a blossoming black middle class dating all the way back to the 1880s. African-American conservatives Walter Williams, Thomas Sowell and Shelby Steele can personally attest to the fact that by the late 1940s, poverty and illiteracy were declining rapidly among African-American communities such as Oakland and crime was no higher than in any other ethnic neighborhoods. Williams, who grew up in a housing project in Philadelphia, writes that “up until the 1940s, 75 to 85 percent of black children lived in two-parent families. Today, 70 percent of black children are born to a single woman. The welfare state has done to black Americans what the harshest form of racism couldn’t do. And that is to destroy the black family.”

A Feb. 1 piece on Black History Month in the Oakland Tribune featured interviews with longtime black Oakland residents about the state of Oakland’s black community after years of liberal rule and policies (though the paper neglected to point out the political connection). Queen Thurston, a woman who grew up in West Oakland, remembers her childhood fondly. “She’d come ‘home right after school, do her homework, then head out with a dozen or more friends and roller skate all over the neighborhood until it got dark, and sometimes later,’” reported the Tribune. “‘The kids used to all get along,’ recalled Thurston, 79. ‘It’s not like today. Families were intact back then.’”

Thurston told the paper, “A lot of these children today have missed out on knowing that there was a lot of greatness that came out of the black community.”

Another lifelong Oakland resident, Sandra Johnson Simon, lamented the condition of the family to the Tribune, saying, “We respected our parents to the utmost. Nowadays, to me, it seems like a lot of these kids don’t understand the definition.”

MISERY: THE LOGICAL RESULT OF LIBERAL POLICIES

The San Francisco Chronicle recently ran a story proclaiming the GOP brand in California dead. Having been ruled by progressive policies for years, the state is a prime example of the damage a government can do to a business climate. With one of the highest sales taxes, the fourth-highest capital gains taxes, one of the worst bond ratings and much more, businesses are leaving the state—which impacts a city on the downward slide like Oakland exponentially harder.

What’s worse: After years of progressive policies, the state is a prime example of the damage a government can do to a community and to families— and with liberal Democratic policies, it becomes a vicious cycle.

One can drive into the ghetto and marvel at the Victorian homes still standing there, built when Oakland was young and the West was still wild. But what is most immediately obvious is the squalid conditions of a once thriving, beautiful community.

This is what happens when liberals are repeatedly placed in charge: Lives are ruined.

Stop to consider ObamaCare. On Feb. 10, Congressional Budget Office Director Doug Elmendorf testified to the House Budget Committee that ObamaCare, when fully implemented, is expected eliminate employment for 800,000 Americans. It turns out that, for Oakland’s permanent underclass, the agents of their misery are the politicians whom they continuously vote to govern them: Lee, Dellums, Brown, President Obama and the rest of the far-Left progressives who are false prophets, who offer to subsidize self-destructive behavior and who are the creators of dependence.

For the members of Oakland’s dependent class, this current incarnation of democracy is not working—it is making their suffering worse. Their elected rulers surely know that whatever the government taxes and regulates—income and jobs—it will get less of. Whatever it subsidizes—unwed motherhood—it will get more of. But they are undeterred. •

In AD 450s the Roman Empire’s sovereignty over Western Europe had shriveled to just a few provinces in central Italy and southern Gaul. Two decades earlier, Germanic invaders, Vandals, who controlled all Iberia (today’s Spain and Portugal) were led by a very able general and king, Gaiseric. They gained control of a fleet of ships, landed in North Africa and captured, Mauritania and Numidia (today’s Morocco and Algeria). In 439, they captured Carthage (in today’s Tunisia) which had become the second largest city in the West.* In so doing, they stripped away the West’s primary food source and its largest surviving tax base. This also officially ended Rome’s naval dominance of the Western Mediterranean which had lasted six hundred years and had proven so vital to the Empire’s great expansion during the second century BC. Not satisfied, in 455, one year after Aetius’ execution, Gaiseric took advantage of his new found maritime hegemony, landed an expeditionary force near Ostia and in that year, sacked the city of Rome for a second time. This was not a respectful sack as was Alaric’s. It reportedly lasted 14 days and was thoroughly pitiless and brutal. Before his departure, he removed thousands of captives including the Emperor Valentinian’s widow and two daughters.

Since the time of Augustus, the Romans had kept meticulous records of their military. In the volumes they referred to as the Notitia Dignitatum, they kept accounts of their many legions, their commanders, their deployments and the numbers of soldiers employed. Their records show that under the Emperor Valentinian, the western armies, on paper, commanded 600,000 soldiers. Yet the chroniclers of the period record that Vandal hoards met virtually no resistance on their march to Rome. Why was there no resistance? Where were the legions? Why did they not defend their homeland?

During the final decades leading up to Rome’s dissolution in AD 476 the historical records are thin. Yet it seems obvious that one of the reasons that no Roman armies opposed the Vandal invaders is because there was no money to pay them. The legionnaires were likely somewhere else attempting to survive in the era of a collapsing central government. We can make an educated guess that the 600,000 legionnaires were fictitious entries made by bureaucrats who either didn’t know or wished to keep up the fiction of Roman martial strength. Perhaps it was a way to keep from their superiors bad news and a ploy to keep their own salaries coming.

Today the conduct of the war with Libya has been characterized by half-measures, a poorly defined mission, and conflicting political objectives. For the first time since the end of the World War II, we are watching the diminution of America as the world’s lone super power. Certainly, our current subordinate support role in this conflict can be seen as partly the result our Nobel Peace Prize president’s world view, his view that America hasn’t the moral authority to initiate and lead wars. It is also clearly a function of the fact that we are structurally bankrupt. We are watching what it means to have slouched into a welfare state economy, to be sliding toward military impotence. What some enterprising journalist needs to ask our current commander in chief is, “When we can’t protect ourselves, Mr. President, who will?”

* The original city had been razed in 146 BC, six hundred years earlier. The citizens who occupied the (New) Carthage were largely Roman or Romanized citizens who bore no relation to the original Phoenician settlers who founded the city around 800 BC.

I point out in my forthcoming book, Lessons from Fallen Civilizations, Europe narrowly escaped complete Islamic conquest twice, first in the eighth and again in the seventeenth century…

For over a century leading up to the battle of Vienna in 1683 which would once again decide the fate of Western Christendom, various and successive Persian Shahs and ambassadors made overtures to the monarchs in the West, the Pope, the Dodge of Venice, the Holy Roman Emperor, the Queen of England, seeking an alliance with them and against the Ottomans, but to no avail. The western powers were too busy fighting wars among themselves. Fortunately for us moderns living in the West now, the Ottomans and Persians who represented the Sunni and Shiite wings of Islam were also at war with one another and not united in the conquest of Europe…

The fact that a low-level private can intercept and dump onto the internet the highest level diplomatic cables sent by and to the State Department is more than a political embarrassment for this administration. (It’s too late to blame Bush.) The diplomatic damage is repairable over time. But when we consider the myriad plots such as the one incubated in Britain aimed at blowing up ten planes over American cities that were thwarted by an informant among the terrorist plotters, the long-term damage done to our intelligence networks is an incalculably grave wound to our national security. There is no doubt that the Islamo terrorist hierarchy is combing the cables for clues as to who the traitors are among them and that most of those not caught and murdered will go silent.

In the conduct of politics which is that messy means by which we collectively make decisions as a nation, truth is often a rare but vital commodity. And there is an upside to the leaks because they expose some very important truths necessary to American survival. First there is reaction and lack of reaction by our current Democrat ruling class.  For example, there is John Kerry who first rose to national prominence in his 1971 Senate appearance where he characterized the entire chain of command in Viet Nam as war criminals. Kerry was only troubled publicly by the second round of leaks which embarrassed the State Department. But he made no comment about the gravity of the first set of leaks which exposed Afghan informants and battlefield methods. And for Obama’s part, due to his seeming indifference, we can only conclude that he’s untroubled by the revelations that North Korea is shipping missiles to Tehran which can carry nuclear warheads that can reach Europe or that they transited on commercial aircraft through Beijing.  As Bret Stephens puts it, its astonishing that the Australian government has not even received a request to take action against Assange, an Australian national who is conducting cyber warfare against the U.S.  As we nervously await the election of 2012, this is vital information.

A core feature of Islamic diplomacy is the principle taqiyya, first employed by the Prophet himself and is one which holds that it is the Muslim’s duty to lie to the infidel if done so as a means to advance his conquest.  Consequently anything that an Islamic official might say, especially for western public consumption, simply cannot be taken at face value. So the leaks are of enormous importance for those of us in the West who are not privy to privileged diplomatic communications yet who have the responsibility to vote for an American Commander-in-Chief and the Congressmen charged with intelligence and military oversight. It was extremely instructive for us to know that the Saudi King Abdullah is much more worried about a nuclear-armed Iran and could care less about the construction of a few housing units in Jerusalem, his public pronouncements notwithstanding.

The leaks so vindicated Israel in the face of decades of Arab/Palestinian/American peace-process duplicity, that Israeli Prime  Minister, Netanyahu, could barely contain his pleasure at a press conference before his country’s major media outlets. The leaks revealed that the panoply of Arab potentate hates Hamas, believe that Hezbollah is a threat to completely destabilize Lebanon and fears Iran’s nuclear weapons program. One cable from the King Khalifa of Bahrain wrote of Iran, “…action to terminate their nuclear program must be taken by whatever means necessary. The danger of letting it go on is greater than the danger of stopping it.”

Egypt’s President Mubarak refers to the Iranians over and over as “liars” and complains to the U.S. that Iran is trying to export a Shiite revolution across the Sunni Middle East.

One cable from Saudi King Abdullah urged a U.S. led attack against Iran to “cut off the head of the snake.”

Despite a half century of pointless diplomacy, so ebullient was Netanyahu at his presser, he even went so far as to suggest that the leaks could be the catalyst for a breakthrough, providing a unified front of Israel and Arab states arrayed against Iran.

While it is a bit of wishful thinking to contemplate an overt Arab/Israeli coalition attack on the Persian regime, it is certainly not far-fetched to envision the Sunni Arabs aiding and abetting the operation. And although there are many dangerous scenarios that may well spring from that event, it would be a positive in the current clash of civilizations because it would turn the Islamic world in upon itself, distracting its militant vanguard from its current focus which is the destabilization and subjugation of the West.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The river outrage is so fulsome because it emanates from three large tributaries. First, is the realization that if an anonymous government official can grope you without any probable cause, what can’t they do to you? What could be a more perfect statement signifying that we no longer control our own government, that it controls us.

Second, being groped by a government official is an outrageous example of politically correct bureaucratic ineptitude. Unlike the Israelis who have used advanced profiling techniques to keep terrorists off their planes successfully for decades, we are outraged when the TSA spends its time patting down a ten-year old kid from Des Moines while the underwear bomber and the Times Square bomber who both traveled numerous times to and from Pakistan and Yemen respectively, were allowed to travel freely.

Third, our outrage comes from fact that this policy shines a bright light on the fact political correctness is a form of cowardice and that we are losing the war with resurgent militant Islam. CAIR (Council of American Islamic Relations) has already put the government on notice—there will be no groping underneath Islamic women’s garments. And we know this government will be cowed into submission. So while some of the Muslims among us plot our demise, they will be left alone and we Judeo Christians will be treated with feigned suspicion. We are outraged to realize that this entire airport security apparatus is a charade; all staged to make us think our government is taking our security seriously when in fact it is too cowardly to do so. We are outraged to realize that the freedoms so fundamental to an America we once knew are under siege.