From the Desert News:

With the release of a new book, ongoing protests and recent reports about Congressional insider trading and stimulus corruption, the phrase “crony capitalism” is getting noticed.

When Occupy Memphis members met with tea party members on Nov. 17, the Associated Press reported they found common ground in their opposition to crony capitalism, where ties between lobbyists, businesses and other interests influence government and hurt free-market capitalism.

“We all want the same form of government, which is one that listens to its constituents,” protester Tristan Tran told tea party members.

“It sounds to me that you all ought to be joining us,” tea party member Jerry Rain said. “You have a lot of the same goals we have.”

Crony capitalism is the dark side of American politics and economics, Jeffrey Sachs writes at The Huffington Post.

“The level of corruption in Washington is staggering, growing, and rife in both parties,” Sachs says. “The White House and Congress dispense billions of dollars of favors to political supporters like a non-stop vending machine.” (more…)

Last month, New York Times reporter James C. McKinley Jr. falsely reported that an FBI informant who helped to thwart a left-wing terrorist plot had actually encouraged the conspiracy. In the article “Anarchist Ties Seen in ’08 Bombing of Texas Governor’s Mansion” published February 22, 2011 online and in the print edition a day later, the Times indicated that former left-wing activist and BigGovernment.com contributor Brandon Darby urged two anarchists to firebomb the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota [emphasis added]:

Yet federal agents accused two men from these circles of plotting to make firebombs and hurl them at police cars during the convention. An F.B.I informant from Austin, Brandon Darby, was traveling with the group and told the authorities of the plot, which he had encouraged.

We brought this to your attention on February 24th when we asked the Times to correct the record. We noted that according to the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Minnesota, the assertion Darby “encouraged” the plot was patently false. On February 27th, we brought in Matthew Vadum, an expert on the circumstances surrounding the plot, to provide broader context to the Times’s smear.

Still, the error remained uncorrected.

Then, last week, a source informed BigJournalism.com that the New York Times reporter acknowledged the charge they published against Darby was in fact bogus, but still, the Times did not correct the article.

As of this writing, the false charge against Darby remains in tact.

Today, Brandon Darby filed a lawsuit against New York Times for libel and defamation. An official letter from Mr. Darby:

We’ll be following the story as it develops on BigJournalism.com and BigGovernment.com.

As a wave of left-wing violence threatens to engulf the nation, why is the progressive New York Times running an ugly campaign of character assassination against a real-life American hero who saved lives and helped to safeguard the nation’s sacred democratic process?

Could it be because the newspaper is sympathetic to the goals of the thuggish community organizers and union goons intimidating state legislatures across America and wants to help advance the liberal-left narrative?

The man with the bull’s eye on his back is Brandon Darby, formerly a far-left community organizer. This heroic defector from the Left stands accused by the New York Times and by angry radical groups of becoming an agent provocateur. Unhinged anarchists across the country would love to get their hands on him.

All over the Internet Darby’s name has been dragged through the mud by the Daily Kos and Crooks and Liars crowd. They accuse him of selling out and pushing the wrongdoers hard enough that he essentially became a co-conspirator. Search for his name with the words traitor, rat, or fink and you’ll see what I mean. (more…)

On, Wisconsin! On, Wisconsin!
Plunge right through that line!
Run the bill clear through that crowd,
Get out of debt this time! (U rah rah!)

On, Wisconsin! On, Wisconsin!
Or it’s Cloward-Piven time.
Fight! Fellows! – fight, fight, fight!
Or it‘ll be our behinds!

I imagine you are aware of all those greedy capitalists in Moscow, Wisconsin, demonstrating so they can keep working in collusion, to siphon public money for their power hungry interests and their own bank accounts.

Sorry for the bad typing; make that government workers, in Madison. “Kill the bill!” they shout and likely spit when they do.  The name of it is the Budget Repair Bill, but much of the Marxstream media call it Gov. Scott Walker’s “anti-union bill.”

Fightin' Bob La Follette, progressive to the ends of his hair

I live forty-some miles northwest of Mad City, in the town where the nation’s first Progressive Party presidential candidate, Robert La Follette married his leftist, feminist wife, in 1881. Yeah, 1881. Politically precocious, we are, here in Badgerland. “Fighting Bob” learned his social justice from U. of W. president, John Bascom, who came from Massachusetts’ Andover Seminary (essentially of the same United Church of Christ denomination as the so reverent Jeremiah Wright).   Those Congregationalists stem from the Puritans, whom, as the name implies, had a soft spot for utopianism and legalistic perfectibility.

Progressivism, but also unvarnished Marxism made inroads very early here in Wisconsin, including within the state and region’s labor movement.  In 1904, the University of Wisconsin became the home of John R. Commons, one of the first progressive incrementalists, a label which tends to cover radical interests of unknown lengths.  He was called the spiritual father of Social Security and he specialized in union studies.  He was also one of America’s progressive eugenicists.

Barry Obama’s hero, Harold Washington was not America’s fist socialist, big city mayor.  That distinction goes to Emil Seidel, elected as Milwaukee’s Marxist boss in 1910, the same year that Victor Luitpold Berger was elected America’s first socialist representative in Congress.

Socialsts tried and convicted, 1919

It was Berger that gave union leader Eugene Debs a copy of Das Kapital and won him over to Marxism.  Debs became the Socalist Party’s candidate for president in 1912, with Mayor Seidel his VP candidate.  However, their Socialist Party of America chose not to run their own candidate for president in 1924, eagerly backing La Follette, instead, much as confessed socialists backed Obama, in 2008.

The Department of Justice was on to Berger and he was tried and in 1919, convicted of rather tenuous charges under the Espionage Act of that time.  Four others were also convicted for their own doings.  Yet, Berger continued to be a political celebrity in Wisconsin.

Those names are just the tip of the top of the iceberg. Extensive information on the Wisconsin front on the Marxist war against American freedoms is available in numerous books and at the Wisconsin Historical Society in Madison, where they have a curious pride in their collection.  Compiled, it is enough to satisfy the appetite of one much more skeptical than our state’s own Sen. Joe McCarthy. (more…)