Obamacare will start the clock ticking on the tolling of the bell for you

By Seth Richardson

In 1984, Democrat Governor Dick Lamm made his Orwellian “we have a duty to die” comment. His actual statement was “We’ve got a duty to die and get out of the way with all of our machines and artificial hearts and everything else like that and let the other society, our kids, build a reasonable life.”

Lamm’s philosophy has been resurrected today in the Obamacare debate. There is substantial truth in the claim that Obamacare will at the very least create de  facto, if not de jure “death panels.” This is because any socialized medical care system must perforce ration medical care, because with government-controlled and funded medical care there is simply never enough to go around at any sort of reasonable cost to the economy.

The calculus of who lives and who dies is a cruel one, because the non-productive always, inevitably, lose out. Under Obamacare this will occur through expedients of government-run medical panels recommending things like “women under 40 don’t need mammograms” and other policy-enabling medical decisions by Progressive lap-dog government experts about what comprises “reasonable and necessary” medical care. These decisions will, and indeed are right now being made by Progressive government lackeys in the Obama administration.

If some government-run medical panel says that regular colonoscopies for men aren’t “medically necessary” until men reach age 65, rather than the current recommendation that men over 50 get them, this medical recommendation will become public policy for government-run health care, including Medicare and Medicaid…and Obamacare. And since the ultimate goal of Obamacare, as stated by Obama himself before the election, is transition to a single-payer, government-run, mandatory, socialized universal health care that, like Canada’s did, prohibits private practitioners from providing out-of-network care to those who can afford it, public policy will dictate who gets and does not get “medically necessary” health care.

And what happens if you delay such medical screening for another 15 years? More men will die of colon cancer that was not detected early enough, which, like the recent guidance on mammograms, is the actual cost-cutting goal. This is what makes government-run medical recommendation panels into Obama Death Panels. They don’t decide on a case-by-case basis. Grandma will not have to stand before them and plead for her life. Instead, as faceless, inaccessible government bureaucrats, they will set broad government policy about the provision of medical services that are deemed to be “medically necessary” and they will allow people to die wholesale because diagnosis and treatment are delayed beyond the point of no return. And as faceless Progressive bureaucrats looking at balance sheets, they will never have to see the effects of their handiwork.

In Socialism, like Progressivism, because the individual and his rights are devalued and the system places greater value on the collective will and good, each person is necessarily forced into involuntary servitude to the State and is compelled to produce according to his ability. This system prohibits suicide because the individual is but a tool of the collective, and the tool must not be allowed to dull its own edge or impair its own usefulness to the needs of the collective. On the other hand, Socialism has no problem with destroying damaged tools once they have outlived their usefulness. This is why all socialized health care systems in existence ration medical care to the elderly, either overtly or covertly.

Socialists and Progressives use a cruel calculation of one’s economic value to the collective, based in how much work can be extracted. When the costs of supporting the worker unit exceed the costs of keeping it alive, they cuts their losses and find a way to dispose of the useless trash. How quickly or brutally slowly this happens depends on how close to full State Socialism the particular culture is. Under Stalinism, where data was kept on individual worker production, and when an individual worker’s productivity fell beneath an established standard, no mercy was shown and they were shipped off to the Gulags of Siberia to work on projects like the Road of Bones until they died, whereupon their corpses were buried where they fell.

Under Democratic Socialism such as the UK, France, or Canada, it’s more subtle, and the State allows the person to die slowly, and sometimes painfully, by reluctantly denying life-saving medical treatments on the excuse that it’s too expensive for society to provide, while simultaneously denying the sick the right to pay for their own medical care because that would be unfair to the other slaves. Government then laments their loss and exhorts the rest of its slaves to work harder, so that even more of the gross national product of the nation can be sucked down the socialized medicine toilet that still lines them up to wait for days, weeks or years for the inadequate treatment they might or might not receive.

That is precisely where we are headed under Progressivism and Obamacare.

No person should ever surrender themselves to involuntary servitude, and while death is the ultimate expression of liberty, as Patrick Henry said, it’s not for the government to decide when one must die. Nor should anyone submit to government murder through bureaucratic regulation or an infringement of the individual right to obtain the very best health care one can afford merely because the government deems your ability to obtain it to be unfair to others.

Don’t think for a moment that Barak Obama, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and their minions are not making these calculations right now, however abstractly or covertly, because they are, and if they succeed, you too will one day exceed the cost/benefit calculus, and the bell will toll for you, whether you’re ready or not.

© 2010 Altnews

The FCC grossly overstepped it’s small legal authority in issuing “net neutrality” regulations

By Seth Richardson

Imagine this: The Food and Drug administration issues new regulations that will supposedly protect citizens from the economic disaster of having only a McDonald’s hamburger stand in their community. These regulations require that in order to provide “fast-food neutrality” all McDonald’s chain stores are required by law to vend hamburgers delivered to it’s stores by Burger King.

Moreover, the regulations require that McDonald’s sell the Burger King burgers at the price that Burger King sets, not at the same price McDonald’s charges for their product.

Burger King can now close down all it’s stores and simply ship pre-made burgers to McDonald’s outlets. This will save Burger King billions in expenses for things like real estate, buildings, employees, et cetera. Instead, they can assemble burgers on a production line in Mexico or China and ship them in bulk in a fleet of trucks, which are way cheaper than building brick-and-mortar stores all over the country.

So, Burger King can then set the price for their burgers far below the price McDonald’s can sell them for, and McDonald’s will be forced to vend the burgers for Burger King.

Does anyone fail to understand the natural, though unintended consequences of burdening McDonald’s with vending Burger King products that Burger King can supply at a fraction of the cost because it need not create the parallel infrastructure of Burger King stores full of employees?

For those that might not get it, the result is that McDonald’s will soon go out of business because it cannot compete with a rival that not only gets to use McDonald’s pre-existing infrastructure investment to vend its product, but that does not have to build its own infrastructure in order to access consumers., and can sell it’s products at a much lower price. Pretty quickly, nobody has ANY hamburgers.

This fiction is exactly what “net neutrality” regulations promulgated by the FCC do to companies like Comcast. The regulations will require Comcast to accept and deliver content from competitors, like Netflix, at a much lower price than Comcast can charge for the very same movie.

Netflix sells movies. Comcast sells movies. That’s fair competition, or so people think. The problem is that Comcast has invested billions of dollars building the infrastructure to deliver it’s products to its customers. Real infrastructure consisting of millions of miles of cables, wires, optical fiber, computers, routers and all manner of durable installations that allow Comcast to deliver digital data to its subscribers. In order to make a profit, it has to price its products sufficiently high to recover the cost of that investment in infrastructure.

Netflix, on the other hand, hasn’t spent a dime on such “final mile” infrastructure, much less interstate and intercontinental data backbone infrastructure. Netflix just buys the right to market movies and owns a bunch of servers and storage connected to the Internet. Netflix doesn’t have the costs associated with building all that network infrastructure to pay for, so it can charge far less for its products than Comcast.

Those who support “net neutrality” (through the brute force expedient of FCC regulations) are demanding that Comcast (McDonald’s) deliver Netflix’s (Burger King’s) products, even though doing so damages Comcast’s ability to pay for the infrastructure it developed and installed, much less make a profit.

That’s not only grossly unfair, it’s flatly unconstitutional and bad business practice. Comcast has a right to restrict who uses their infrastructure to deliver competing products. If Netflix wants to deliver movies to its customers, then it should either build its own network infrastructure, at its own expense, or it should pay Comcast what Comcast asks for the use of its infrastructure.

By the same token, Comcast should be under no obligation to deliver a directly competing product merely because it has a dominant marketing position in any particular area, any more than McDonald’s should be required to vend Burger King products merely because Burger King has decided not to open a local outlet in a particular region.

What the FCC has done is to seize the private property rights of Comcast and other internet service providers for the ostensible benefit of consumers, which is a violation of the Fourth Amendment proscription on taking private property for public use without just compensation.

This “net neutrality” regulation must, and likely will be tossed out… again… by the Supreme Court. And it should be. Because if it’s not, Comcast and other similar companies will go out of business, and everyone’s Internet access will be degraded or eliminated.

Remember, Comcast has invested billions in creating “final mile” infrastructure. If they go out of business, tens of millions of people will instantly lose connectivity to the Internet entirely, because Comcast is under no obligation to let anyone else use their infrastructure, or even keep it maintained.

So, “net neutrality” supporters, be careful what you wish for, and give some serious consideration to the unintended consequences of your position.

© 2010 Altnews

So is scandium, lanthanum, erbium and thulium, among other rare-earth metals essential to military technology

By Seth Richardson

Rare-earth metals are called “rare” because they are. And they are valuable because they are used in very small, but critical and irreplaceable amounts in much of our technology, from night vision devices for our military to cell phones.

Rare as they are, they are also essential strategic minerals, and the inability to obtain them can cripple our military and our civilian technology, which would cripple our economy and our national security. This fact makes it necessary for the United States to ensure unrestricted access to domestic rare-earth minerals.

Even the U.S. Department of Energy agrees with me in this, and is recommending that we must ensure a steady, reliable supply by re-opening our mines.

Unfortunately, thanks largely to the eco-nut anti-mining zealots in the U.S., some ninety percent of rare-earth mineral production now occurs in China, as a result of burdensome, deliberately obstructive regulation and huge financial liability risks that drove U.S. companies out of the mining industry decades ago.

This leaves the U.S. at the mercy of the Communist Chinese regime, who are, and have been for some time, tightly controlling exports and prices. China has been reserving most of its production for itself, to be used in it’s cell phone plants and by its military.

That has to change, and Colorado can be at the forefront of ensuring our strategic future in rare-earth minerals.

Molycorp Minerals, a mining company based in Greenwood Village, is investing hundreds of millions of dollars to rebuild America’s rare-earth mineral mining capacity. Good for them.

What we have to do is to help them in this effort by shutting down the inevitable neo-Luddite anti-mining protests and frivolous lawsuits that are certain to avalanche down upon Molycorp Minerals from the ivory towers and gilded pedestals of the eco-nut fringe.

“Gold is where you find it” goes the aphorism of precious-metals miners everywhere. It means that minerals are found where the geological conditions of the past put them. You can’t grow gold, or ytterbium, in an alternate location to suit the tender sensibilities of aesthetic preservationists or eco-fascists. Where you discover it, there you must mine it. There is simply no way around that fact.

And since it’s in our national strategic economic and military interests to mine and refine rare-earth minerals domestically, we must therefore accept whatever environmental impacts are reasonably necessary in order to extract the materials where they are found.

This doesn’t mean that wanton destruction or negligent pollution is permissible, and Molycorp Minerals claims that technological breakthroughs in mining and processing such materials will largely eliminate the prior difficulties with pollution and escapes of processing chemicals that plagued previous efforts and caused literally all of the major rare-earth mines in the U.S. to be shut down.

But there will be impacts, and we have to reject the neo-Luddites and eco-fascists and their hysterical obstructionism and accept the fact that there will inevitably be some visual and environmental impacts from such mining. But what is gained is worth the sacrifice of the relatively small areas where such minerals are found in concentrations that can be mined economically.

We need to hold Molycorp Minerals to the highest standards of protection of the environment that are reasonably appropriate for the particular mine, but we must not allow federal environmental policy to be misused and abused by people who simply want no mining and no environmental impacts whatsoever anywhere by anyone for any reason, out of a misguided and deluded sense of eco-outrage over past mining policies or their own selfish preferences for a pristine environment.

It is critical that we rebuild our rare-earth mining capacity and that we do not unnecessarily or unreasonably obstruct the search for and exploitation of mineral lodes of these vital strategic national resources by imposing burdensome regulations at the behest of deluded people who cannot comprehend the strategic necessity of securing our own mineral wealth rather than being dependent upon a totalitarian Communist regime that is, at the core, utterly hostile and opposed to everything we believe in.

© 2010 Altnews

Avoiding impertinent, abusive and irrelevant questions about ballot issues was the right thing to do.

By Seth Richardson

Douglas Bruce, the implacable and much-hated foe of liberal Progressive tax-and-spend big government ideologues everywhere tried hard to avoid being dragged into court to answer impertinent and irrelevant questions about who was behind the now-defeated Amendments 60, 61 and 101. It was a valiant effort that ultimately failed just weeks before the election, when his attackers, Coloradans for Responsible Reform, in the corpus of their attorney Mark Grueskin, succeeded in linking him to the ballot issues in the press.

Bruce insisted that his involvement in the ballot issues was a matter of First Amendment free speech not subject to Colorado’s campaign finance laws, and that his opponents were attempting to drag the issue into court on a fishing expedition deliberately intended to manipulate the vote by impugning the ballot issues by linking them to Mr. Bruce in a blatant personal attack. Bruce was precisely correct in this characterization of the successful witch-hunt by Grueskin & Company.

Now, Democrat Rep. Beth McCann of Denver is proposing amendments to the campaign finance laws to make it more difficult to avoid such fishing expeditions. Quoted in the Denver Post on Friday, December 10, McCann said, “It’s from the charade that went on last year with Doug Bruce avoiding service and making it very difficult for the case that was brought to determine who was financing those three initiatives. It seemed like Doug Bruce was just thumbing his nose at the court system.”

Well, yes, he was, and rightfully so, because the court system was being abused to the benefit his political opponents. Bruce made it “very difficult” for Grueskin to serve him with a subpoena to appear for a deposition, but he did so within the law, as demonstrated by the fact that a contempt citation against him was dismissed.

Nothing in the law requires a defendant to cooperate with the efforts of opposing counsel to serve legal process, and if the papers aren’t properly served, the defendant is under no legal obligation to appear. It’s the plaintiff’s problem to get the defendant properly served, and if he can’t do it, too bad. That’s how it’s always been, and how it should remain.

And, it turns out that Bruce was correct in insisting that who funds or supports a ballot issue is none of the public’s business. So says the United States Circuit Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, in a decision handed down just days after the November 2nd vote.

In a Colorado case that addressed whether a small group of homeowners who spent less than $800 campaigning against an annexation ballot issue in Parker, Colo, (Sampson v. Buescher), violated Colorado’s campaign finance laws, the Court held that as applied to ballot issues, Colorado’s law is unconstitutional.

The three-judge panel said, “Without question, Colorado election laws place burdens on the right to associate to support or oppose ballot issues.” Then the Court went on to explain why disclosures of campaign funding for candidates and for ballot issues have different constitutional justifications.

Citing Supreme Court precedents, the panel came to the obvious conclusion that unlike potentially corrupt politicians who may abuse the public trust by acting in favor of campaign donors, ballot issues cannot be the subject of such quid-pro-quo corruption because they cannot exert any influence other than what is stated in the law itself.

“…when a ballot issue is before the voter, the choice is whether to approve or disapprove of discrete governmental action, such as annexing territory, floating a bond, or amending a statute. No human being is being evaluated. When many complain about the deterioration of public discourse—in particular, the inability or unwillingness of citizens to listen to proposals made by particular people or by members of particular groups—one could wonder about the utility of ad hominem arguments in evaluating ballot issues. Nondisclosure could require the debate to actually be about the merits of the proposition on the ballot. Indeed, the Supreme Court has recognized that “[a]nonymity . . . provides a way for a writer who may be personally unpopular to ensure that readers will not prejudge her message simply because they do not like its proponent.”"

Citing a Supreme Court case, the panel took notice of the historical presumption that the voters are capable of examining and analyzing the merits or deficiencies of a ballot issue itself, without reference to the character or political popularity of the proponents.

“But the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market. Don’t underestimate the common man. People are intelligent enough to evaluate the source of an anonymous writing. They can see it is anonymous. They know it is anonymous. They can evaluate its anonymity along with its message, as long as they are permitted, as they must be, to read that message. And then, once they have done so, it is for them to decide what is responsible, what is valuable, and what is truth.”

This is exactly correct. Indeed, it’s good public policy because in the case of ballot issues, it is the focus on the character of the proponents rather than the issue itself that is abusive of the system. Good government depends upon careful scrutiny of the actions of government that are authorized by ballot issues, not upon the public perception of the quality or character of the proponents or opponents. Effective civil discourse on the subject of laws or government actions must focus on the act itself, otherwise the true effects and extent of government authority is masked in the fog of ad hominem attacks.

And that is precisely what Grueskin and Coloradans for Responsible Reform achieved with their abuse of the legal process, in cahoots with the Bruce-hating liberal Press, who focused on the whack-a-mole antics of the process servers trying to find Mr. Bruce while studiously avoiding any substantive discussion of the ballot issues themselves.

The ongoing controversy about Bruce’s involvement in Amendments 60, 61 and 101 prove the utility and necessity of the 10th Circuit’s ruling. Bruce is still facing a trial in Denver District Court over the mess. Hopefully he’ll persuade the District Court of the wisdom of the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals’ ruling and the case will be dismissed. It certainly should be.

Grueskin and the Coloradans for Responsible Reform’s witch-hunt for Douglas Bruce should further serve to expand the 10th Circuit Court’s ruling to exempt all proponents or supporters of ballot issues from disclosure rules.

Why? Well, in part because requiring disclosure on the part of supporters of a particular ballot issue violates their fundamental right to a secret ballot, and in some cases places them in physical danger from opponents.

Precisely this sort of threat was recently observed in California, where the names and addresses of people who signed petitions in favor of Proposition 8, which reserved the term “marriage” for use by heterosexual couples, were subjected to harassment and physical and economic attack after their names were posted on the Internet by radical gay activists.

Just as one’s vote is to be kept secret, one must be allowed to anonymously support ballot issues. This anonymity is essential to our fundamental liberty to be free of coercion and harassment for our political opinions and votes.

While requiring disclosure in the case of candidates has at least some (but not much) legitimate governmental objective of reducing the potential for quid-pro-quo corruption, that rationale simply does not apply to ballot issues.

Who supports a ballot issue is, and should be, no one’s business, and certainly not the business of the public. Only the merits of the issue are important, and they are supremely important, so any law that serves to shift the focus of the public debate away from the language of the ballot issue itself must be repealed in the interests of good government.

The abuse of Douglas Bruce, and the abuse of the political process perpetrated by Grueskin’s clients is ample demonstration of why Rep. McCann’s proposal must not only be defeated, but why the General Assembly should take action to explicitly exempt campaign contributions or actions in support of ballot issues from the campaign finance laws.

© 2010 Altnews

Losers in Obama’s race to the trough education reform “contest” lose twice

By Seth Richardson

Back when the Colorado legislature was drooling over the prospect of “winning” free money from the Obama administration’s “Race to the Top” education reform charade, I opined that it would be a bad idea to rush into law changes that would empower the central-planning efforts of the Obama Department of Education in return for a vacant promise of reward.

Well, I told you so.

Not only did we lose the competition (which was a rigged to begin with) but now we’re stuck with the fiscal consequences of pandering to our federal overlord, who has accepted our gift of obedience to his Progressive agenda but has ignored the actual costs to the taxpayers of Colorado that are the result of our obsequious groveling before his mightiness.

Like other loser states, Colorado hastily and imprudently enacted education reforms on the mere chance that we would get the federal funding to implement them, and now we’re going to have to pay for the reforms out of our own pocket.

Meanwhile, Obama and the educrats at the Department of Education are laughing their asses off at the credulity and stupidity of the 39 states that didn’t “win.”

The point was never to provide substantial additional funding to serve actual children. The whole point of the exercise was to entice states into making statutory changes that the Progressives wanted without having to pay for most of them.

That’s why it was a “contest.” It’s no different than a “contest” that offers one big prize to millions of people who do nothing but send in their name and address information.

Such “contests” are nothing more than marketing campaigns to harvest personal information, which in aggregate is worth far more to the marketers than the cost of one car or refrigerator. Such schemes depend upon the avarice and credulity of an ignorant public, who will give up their privacy for the infinitesimal chance they will win something.

Well, Obama did exactly the same thing, except this time the stakes were considerably higher. The educrats get more power and control over the education of our children, and we get nothing, and worse than nothing. We actually put ourselves into greater government debt by enacting laws that mandate further state spending, all for nothing.

I told you so.

Even Democrat state Senator Evie Hudak admits that we were snookered. “We’re stuck now. The mandates are all there, but we don’t have the money. The whole thing was poorly thought out,” she’s quoted as saying in an Associated Press story by Kristen Wyatt in Monday’s Gazette.

“Poorly thought out?” Ya think? You should, because I told you so.

But who shall we blame? How about Hudak herself, who voted to pass HB09-1065 bill on May 5, 2009? Where were her concerns then, pray tell?

Sounds to me like she’s headed for Dante’s Bolgia Six of the Eighth Circle of Hell, which is reserved for hypocrites, who wander listlessly for eternity cloaked in gilded lead, which represents the falsity of their actions. Or perhaps she and all of the other legislators who voted for the scam will land in the Eighth Circle’s Fifth Bolgia’s lake of boiling pitch, reserved for corrupt politicians, or perhaps Bolgia Two, filled with human excrement and reserved for flatterers. After all, their obsequious flattery and groveling before the Mighty Obama ought to qualify them for that eternal punishment.

So, here we are. We allowed our legislature to pander to Obama and now we’re going to pay the price for our cupidity and blind ignorance from our own pockets. Fitting punishment I suppose. Perhaps this will teach us never to believe the promises of Washington, and to choose more carefully than people like Hudak when selecting our state representatives.

Somehow I doubt it though.

I told you so.

© 2010 Altnews

All that was missing in a St. Lucie County, Florida kindergarten class was the Little Red Book of Chairman Mao

By Seth Richardson

From 1975 to 1979, Pol Pot and the communist Khmer Rouge ruled Cambodia with a bloodied iron fist. Purges of intellectuals and the educated killed some two million people. Part of the Communist manifesto as practiced by the Khmer Rouge included Maoist “re-education camps” where intellectuals and educated persons were forced to “confess” their crimes of intellectualism and stand before the proletariat to be reviled and denounced. After this humiliation, the vast majority found themselves on their knees with a pistol at the back of their necks and ended up as just another corpse in the notorious killing fields of Cambodia.

The mantra of the Khmer Rouge towards those who were insufficiently obedient and collectivistic was “To keep you is no benefit, to destroy you is no loss.”

Children were deliberately taken from their capitalistically-tainted parents (who were often killed), and brainwashed into Maoist communism and taught torture methods using animals. The Pol Pot regime drew heavily for it’s anti-intellectualism from the French Communist Party, under which Pol Pot studied before returning to Cambodia.

Lest anyone think that communism of the Pol Pot variety has not infected our pubic school systems, the cautionary tale of little Alex Barton of St. Lucie County, Florida indicates otherwise.

Alex is a troublesome child. Diagnosed with Aspergers Syndrome, a form of autism, he’s been disruptive in his kindergarten classes. In response to this, his kindergarten teacher, Wendy Portillo, twice sent him to the principal’s office for discipline, but the third time Alex was disruptive, Portillo acted more like Pol Pot or Chairman Mao than a professional educator.

She reportedly stood a five-year-old boy with a learning disability up before the class and encouraged his classmates to revile him and tell how his behavior had affected them. According to the Associated Press, Alex was forced to “stand in front of his peers and be told why ‘they hated him’.”

Then in the finest Maoist tradition, she mandated a “vote” by his kindergarten classmates, who quite naturally voted to expel him from class. Portillo, a “professional” educator obviously knows how cruelly selfish and uncaring other five-year-olds can be, which apparently suited her desire for revenge upon the little reactionary traitor perfectly. The impact of being so thoroughly rejected by one’s classmates in such a fashion would certainly be emotionally devastating to any child, much less one suffering from a mental disability.

All that separates Portillo’s thirst for public humiliation and communist indoctrination from the Khmer Rouge are the killing fields, but the ideological intent is identical; humiliate and torture the victim, and further the conformist indoctrination of the rest of the class in the process. Like the Khmer Rouge, Portillo’s actions show that she cared nothing for the rights or dignity of the child as an individual, but rather she cared only for rigid order and proletarian conformity from her young charges, to be enforced by sacrificing the dignity of the standing nail.

As bad as the soul-searing humiliation she inflicted on Alex is the communist principle she she taught the other children in the class: Those who are different, those who do not conform and obey, those who stand above or apart from others, no matter the reason, will be hammered down into amorphous, cowed conformity or they will be destroyed. She powerfully demonstrated to her charges that they too are in danger of being mercilessly humiliated and driven out if they dare to disobey or disrupt her ideological indoctrination.

Portillo’s actions iconically demonstrate the depth of the infection of the Frankfurt School Marxist/communist educational philosophy in our public schools.

For those who don’t know what the Frankfurt School is, it’s a group of neo-Marxists and communists who formed the Institute for Social Research in Germany before WWII, who then imported this Marxist/communist political ideology to the United States in 1935, during the Progressive upswing of the FDR administration.

The Frankfurt School was first rooted at Columbia University, where it’s pernicious ideology was eagerly accepted by the Progressive academia of the time. The infection continues to spread and eats away at American education to this day, and it has an overwhelming influence on teachers and teacher’s unions nationwide.

Notable among Columbia’s radical revolutionary Marxist/communist educator alumni is Weather Underground terrorist bomber William Ayers, who obtained Masters of Education degrees in Early Childhood Education and Curriculum and Instruction from Columbia. It would be foolish to think that Ayers sought these degrees and spent his academic career affecting public education in this country because he loves children. He’s a hard-line, violence-loving Marxist radical who has said that he is willing to kill 25 million people in the name of his ideology. He alone has caused incalculable harm to the Republic and liberty through his position of academic authority in public education. And that’s no coincidence.

The Frankfurt School philosophy holds that the most effective way to bring about global Marxism and communism, and to destroy capitalism and liberty, is to infiltrate the educational system and progressively indoctrinate and brainwash our children into proper Marxist/communist thought patterns and behaviors.

Portillo’s example of this philosophy is a classic one.

The scary thing is, the Marxists are correct, that is precisely how global Marxism/communism will come to pass, and the evidence of the spreading infection is everywhere in our schools, including St. Lucie County schools, at the hands of people like Wendy Portillo and those who protect her.

The upshot of this event is mixed, but in main it’s a dismal result. Alex’s mother, Melissa Barton, sued Portillo, the school district and the teacher’s union. The case was recently settled, with $350,000 going to Alex and his mother. That’s wonderful for Alex and his mom, but what about the rest of the students in the district, particularly those in Portillo’s classes? Who will protect and de-program them?

You see, while Portillo served a one-year unpaid suspension in the case (some would call it a “sabbatical”), she is now back in the classroom, where she can easily infect more children with her pernicious ideology, and she didn’t have to pay a dime of the settlement out of her own pocket.

Worse, even though Schools Superintendent Michael Lannon recommended that Portillo be placed on a year-to-year contract, the school board reinstated Portillo’s tenure.

TCPalm reporter Colleen Wixon reports that Portillo’s attorney Allen Sang says that Portillo “…just want’s to teach kids,” and that “(Portillo) is just very happy to be back in the classroom doing what she loves to do.”

I’m sure she is very happy. But should she be allowed to do so? Any teacher who inflicts such devastating emotional and psychological harm on an entire classroom full of impressionable children has no business being in a classroom anywhere.

As a result of the settlement, neither the school district, the teacher’s union, nor Portillo admitted any wrongdoing, so there is no official record of a judgment against them, which serves to whitewash Portillo and the union, thereby evading public scrutiny and opprobrium for their Marxist proclivities. This is an all-too-common result.

So, as in most of the rest of the country, where leftist teachers and teacher’s unions protect Marxist/communist ideology and indoctrination techniques however they can, including by settling complaints using taxpayer hush-money, the children of St. Lucie County, Florida, will continue to be taught to be good, obedient little Marxist proletarians, or else, and the Frankfurt School plan to enslave our children will go on unabated and unchallenged.

© 2010 Altnews