Tag Archives: transformation

by Barry Kelly | November 3, 2014 · 7:35 am

INSIGHTS 170 — Writer’s Choice

With the publication of my second non-fiction book, “Stepping Stones to Tyranny,” I will have said most of what I believe about the dangers of -ISMs, progressivism in any form without repeating the same theme. “Stepping Stones to Tyranny” has been approved by CIA in manuscript form but they still need to approve the galley proofs before I can publish the book.

“Stepping Stones” is a follow to “INSIGHTS: Transforming America — Is This What We Fought for?” with new material. Both of these books were written to explain the ‘transformation process’ to all Americans regardless of political leanings. If we get the government we deserve, as many pundits have stated, we at least should understand what we voted for.

I will still write some blogs, but fewer and not all about politics. My keyboard is now occupied with my fifth novel in the Justice series using Jack Brandon and his team to keep us safe from terrorism, both foreign and home grown. I’m having fun again. I enjoy putting my characters in dangerous positions and watching them deal with the bad guys. I know these characters so well they take over the writing, or, at least, it seems they do. I now call my novel in progress “Quiet Justice.” Of course, my editor and publisher haven’t approved my title yet.

As a parting reminder: It doesn’t matter which party increases the size of government, it is the absolutely wrong thing for a free people to do. Without big government and the high taxes necessary to support it, tyranny doesn’t have much of a chance. Deciding when government is big enough to perform its constitutional duties and when its very size presents a danger to freedom should be the decision foremost in every politician’s head. For the conservatives the danger of big government is the lynch pin in their core beliefs. Nearly everything else is negotiable.

Written by the author of the Jack Brandon thriller/mystery novels and “Insights: Transforming America — Is This What We Fought For?” available now as an ebook, in paperback or hardcover on Amazon.com or BN.com. Follow the author on Twitter @factsfictions80. If you think this message is important, please share it.

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Filed under Barry Kelly, Books, Intelligence & Politics, management theory, Obama, political solutions, Progressives, Terrorism

Tagged as Immigration, transformation

by starediting | September 26, 2014 · 7:35 am

INSIGHTS 158 — WHO IS TO BLAME FOR OUR MESS? PART 2

In my previous blog, I outlined the mess we are in. Find that blog here. Read on to find out who is to blame for that mess.

Now, who is to blame for all this mess we are in?

Many brilliant scholars and thinkers have long pointed out that people get the government they deserve. In my mind, we are all to blame.

The people voted for an unproven candidate with a dubious background that included many blank spaces. These voters believed the progressives’ promises about hope and change would enable them to transform America. This was not a hidden agenda. Barack Obama was clear about what he was going to do. His candidate speeches and writings were transparent.

What wasn’t transparent was how this transformation of America was to take place. The citizens who voted twice for this president bear some of the blame

beforeitsnews.com

for today’s mess. Their votes were based on hope, dislike of President Bush, and ignorance of the history of the world’s transformers, Marx, Lenin, Mao, Castro, Hitler and several lesser-known champions of utopian societies under the management of a so-called benign elite. All utopian -isms end up the same way. In harsh, repressive societies.

Conservatives and independents are not free of blame. In fact, their participation, or lack thereof, may deserve a large part of the blame. Most of us knew electing a man with no experience to be president was very high risk. If he surrounded himself with knowledgeable Cabinet members and White House staff, we thought it might be okay. Also, he is black and many of us were proud America had elected a black president. Now I wish it had been a different black candidate.

We didn’t know this president had a very different agenda. His transformation plan required the destruction of the opposition before a one-party system could take over and complete the socialization of America, where everyone got a fair shot and income is redistributed from the haves to the have-nots, both domestically and internationally. The usual utopian drivel.

We, who had reservations, didn’t do enough in either 2008 or 2012. We didn’t try hard enough to explain the transformation process to our more liberal friends. We didn’t contribute enough money. We didn’t support good candidates and let the Republican establishment and the stupid cumbersome primaries pick our candidates. Both candidates, at best, had only a marginal chance of winning. So we got the government we deserved. Now, what do we do about it?

Do you like and understand what you’re reading? Share it with your friends and leave me comments here or on Amazon. I read them! You can also visit my Facebook page or follow me on Twitter. This content and more is available in my latest book, “INSIGHTS: Transforming America.”

INSIGHTS 157 — WHO’S TO BLAME FOR OUR MESS? PART 1

beforeitsnews.com

Most Americans seem to realize the country is in a mess, both domestically and internationally. The evidence is clear to all but the fringe true believers who have totally closed their minds to new or conflicting information.

You don’t have to look far. We have fewer people in the workforce than anytime in the last eight years. Wages have not keep pace with inflation. More people are on food stamps and their numbers are growing faster than ever before. The dollar is losing strength. Only those who can afford to make investments in the stock market are doing better than okay. The president’s Qualitative Easing program has pumped varying amounts as high as 86 billion dollars a month into the economy for the last several years, creating an artificial stock market for the well-to-do, but widened the gap between the haves and have-nots. The progressives have created an ideal economy for their class warfare rhetoric.

Tax reform has been ignored. Social programs and debt servicing are eating deeply into the gross national product and getting worse each year. Obamacare has yet to find a niche where it is actually helping people. Regulations are killing business and driving American corporations overseas in search of friendly business locations. Government is growing at a rate far beyond what is necessary. Power is accruing to the executive branch. The separation of powers contained in the Constitution is being rapidly eroded. Congress, largely due to its timidness, is becoming irrelevant. At least the progressives in charge know where they are driving the country. The Republicans do not.

If anything good is happening domestically, it is hard to find. The president, the attorney general and profession racists raise the race flag at every opportunity. The once-prestigious New York Times and Washington Post have become ideological supporters of the progressive agenda. Selective omission and slanting of the news is an everyday affair.

Our universities are no longer bastions of free thinking and speech. They too are turning out left-wing ideologues, rather than graduates who have learned to question orthodoxy and think outside the box. Pride in America is hard to find in progressive ranks and the history of our country is, according to Obama’s progressives, something we must apologize for. The progressive party refers to our armed forces in Iraq as an occupying force. At a time of real dangers in the world, President Obama is cutting the armed forces back to pre-WWII levels.

Internationally, nothing done by the president’s direction has gone right. First, the do-nothing but travel everywhere secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, and the “never saw a situation he couldn’t make worse” John Kerry, have made a shambles out negations with Iran, Iraq, Israel, the Palestinians, Russia, China, Europe, and the Middle East. If there ever was gang in the White House that couldn’t shoot straight, this is it. Ukraine, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Israel, and Benghazi come to mind. The foreign policy list of unbelievable gaffs could go on much longer.

Read my next blog to find out who is to blame for all this mess. Coming later this week.

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Filed under Barry Kelly, class warfare, Conservative views, foreign policy, Intelligence & Politics, Obama, Obamacare, political solutions, Politics

Tagged as Benghazi, Bush, class warfare, Congress, Iran, iraq, Middle East, transformation, White House

by Barry Kelly | September 17, 2014 · 7:30 am

EIGHT DECADES OF INSIGHTS 153

OBAMA’S SCORECARD – PART 1

washingtontimes.com

It will soon be six years since Barack Obama was elected president of the United States. The traditional way of evaluating a president is to judge how he has done as a leader to solve problems concerning the economy, national security, and foreign policy. We could do that here, but that wouldn’t be addressing what President Obama has been doing. To be fair, he should be scored on what he has been working to accomplish. To do that, we have to use the tasks relevant to progressive goals, for those are what is important to President Obama and his legacy.

President Obama’s overall goal is the transformation of America. That term means very little unless you examine the steps that are required in the process of transformation. The first step is to marginalize his opposition, the Republican Party, by a skillful manipulation of issues. Remember, the progressive mantra is “the issue is never the issue.” In short, that means you don’t try to solve problems or issues, you simply use every issue to instead attack the opposition. Changing sides on issues or lying about what you said previously about the issue doesn’t matter and happens often. To progressives, the end justifies the means as long as your intent is to seize power and wealth from those who have it and give to the have-nots. This goes for both individuals and nations.

Domestically, Obama has done this by:

increasing taxes on the top earners
instituting death taxes so families cannot pass on wealth to heirs
put forth regulations to hamper business expansion
raised minimum wages
increased unemployment benefits
expanded food stamp recipients
Obamacare
internationally signing treaties in the area of climate change
taxes on burning carbon
providing payments to the United Nations and other groups and nations that do not share our goals.

Obama, so far, only gets a “C” for his redistribution of wealth goals, but he is making progress.

Another progressive goal is to weaken America in the international arena among its allies and adversaries. A major task in this goal is to destroy America’s ability to project power outside our borders. The value of our word in foreign affairs is at a very low point. No one, enemies nor allies, believes us. They see our will and resolve as non-existent. Our unwise withdrawal from Iraq, Obama’s haste to get us into Afghanistan and then withdraw on a meaningless time table, redlines that disappear and negotiations that have no substance have been effective in reducing our world power. In the president’s drive to diminish American power and prestige internationally, he deserves an “A.”

Stay tuned for part 2 of this blog, coming later this week, which will score Obama on increasing government control; expanding the executive branch; and weaken the U.S. military.

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Filed under Barry Kelly, Conservative views, Eight Decades of Insights, Intelligence & Politics, Obama, Obamacare, Politics

Tagged as government, Obama, Progressive, Republican, Saul Alinsky, socialism, transformation

by Barry Kelly | August 7, 2014 · 7:35 am

EIGHT DECADES OF INSIGHTS 137

FREEDOM OF CHOICE

The real result of all far-left ideologies, be they communism, socialism, or Obama’s progressivism, is their impact on the choices left to other groups, organizations, and individuals. Far-left ideologies all have the goal of establishing a one-party system of government to manage the affairs of business, education, health, industry, justice, the military, and individuals. The progressive government is controlled by a small group of the progressive elite. The driving force is that the elite progressives “know what is better for everyone.” They are not evil. They just believe that the only way to establish their version of heaven on earth is to take control of all aspects of society. This is where they get their willingness to constantly use any means to accomplish the end: “a much better and fairer life for all.”

The very essence of progressivism is to control choice because they believe it is chaos when people are free to chose their life’s occupation, their education, reading material, TV programs, news, religion, ways of raising children, including the choice to have children or not, health care, and the people who govern them. The current struggle in America between conservatives and liberals (the far-left liberals are progressives who now control the Democratic Party) is not over some obscure political difference. It is over who makes life’s choices, you or a progressive elite.

Progressives and communists hate what capitalism and the free market stand for. They do not believe the forces of the free market are real and think greed is the only driving force of capitalism. Progressives will not believe the infinite number of choices made by a free people in a free competitive economy can result in anything but chaos. Instead, a small group of progressives can make better economic decisions that will produce a vastly more efficient economy and much fairer distribution of wealth.

The promise of freedom is the existence of choices. Without individual choices there is no freedom. Those of us who have lived seven or eight decades have seen, sometimes up close and personal, societies where the basic choices Americans exercise every day were unheard of or only imagined. The Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, China, Cuba, Vietnam, and some South American nations have tried various far-left ideologies. In every one of them personal or individual choices vanished.

The last remaining choice is to fight the system. Not many take that choice. All isms can be measured by the choices made by an elite and those made by the people. North Vietnam under Ho Chi Minh, probably the best political organizer of the 20th century, had North Vietnamese people organized into to a cascading staircase of political, economic, and social organizations. Everyone belonged to a peer organization with each peer group sending a delegate to the next higher group. There was no real individual choice.

All of the socialist, communist, or progressive one party elites are more or less the same. The more mature the system becomes the more extensive its choice making. Let’s look at a few of those. Take education. The elites decide what schools and courses will be available, who will be selected to go to what school, and what each will study. The same elites will decide what doctor, what hospital, what treatment is authorized, where people can live, what size of apartment, what will be grown on the farms, what industries will be allowed, and what each will produce in both quality and quantity. Some even decide how many children a couple can have. Internal travel and trips to other countries is strictly controlled.

When you lose your individual freedom, you lose the right to make most of life’s choices. The elites will look after you. When you think about something conceptual like freedom, think instead about the right of making choices being taken from you and your family. Don’t be taken in by the words. They don’t mean anything. Remember, “if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.” Without choice all hopes are narrowed.

Don’t be uniformed. READ “INSIGHTS : Transforming America — Is This What We Fought For?” Now in paperback for $9.95 and kindle free at Amazon. Help spread the message.