The American Spring Bears Poisonous Fruit

Persephone ate 6 pomegranate seeds after being abducted by Hades, thus condemning her to 6 months a year in the Underworld and 6 months above with the Gods of Greek mythology.

Once upon a time there was a bright, shining city on a hill… An evil, so vile as to level the city bore down upon it with its hellish dark army and vicious commanders rejoicing in the destruction of freedom’s only stronghold. I wish this were a fairy tale, then I could tell you that there would be a happy ending, but I cannot. However, there is an evil witch involved – enter stage left Frances Fox Piven wickedly casting her Occupy spell over America:

• The Occupy Wall Street movement is entering the phase where it “makes trouble.”
• “We’ll see action against the banks, against the corporations.”
• Different forms of protests that will engage many people.
• Occupy was helped by “sympathetic” press coverage.

For those of you who say that Piven and Soros are old and toothless, you’d better face their evil in its totality. Just because you don’t believe they want to bring us down, doesn’t mean they don’t believe in it wholeheartedly. Piven will revel in the chaos this spring and summer. She passes out poisonous fruit in the form of class warfare and hatred like candy. Soros is using his billions to reshape the world in his image and foment as much mayhem as he can in order to garner himself ever more power and wealth. Both of these people fancy themselves as divine beings, rather than what they really are – old spiders spinning killing webs with the help of useful idiots, the Occupy Movement and Anonymous.

Piven is predicting the Occupy Movement is entering the phase where it “makes trouble” and will soon be taking action against banks and other institutions.

“It may well be that the Occupy movement is now in its second phase, in the phase where it makes trouble, in the phase where it threatens to shut down institutions,” Piven said. “The Occupy movement has moved into the neighborhoods of our cities, it has moved into the schools….This spring, we’ll see action against the banks, against the corporations.”

Piven went on to spew more wealth redistributionist venom:

“The people who were sitting on top of the world, the top-tenth of the top 1 percent, were guilty. They were guilty of thievery, of chicanery.”

From The Blaze: (videos on site)

The Occupy Movement has indeed partaken of the poisonous fruit offered to them. But there will be no prince to awaken them when they fall and God tends to turn His back on those who choose the wrong side.

Piven is certainly not alone in her efforts. From People’s World:

There’s another springtime swirling here: the rebirth of the Occupy movement. Organizers, “citizens of the Internet,” global activists and undoubtedly the infamous Black Bloc are planning to make a journey to the city that gave birth to May Day and the fight for the 8-hour day beginning on International Workers Day, May 1.

Now, pledging non-violence, Occupy Chicago and Adbusters, the group that brought us Occupy Wall Street, have sent out calls far and wide via YouTube, Tumblr and Facebook for 50,000 to descend on Chicago in May. Why? That’s when Chicago will be hosting meetings of G8 and NATO, two of the most powerful multilateral groups in the world, representatives of the global 1%. G8 represents the eight largest capitalist economies in the world and NATO is their military force.

Don’t let the fact that Obama has moved the G8 meeting to Camp David distract you. That move was a gift to the Occupy Movement. It telegraphed that they are a force to be reckoned with, to be respected, to be feared… Obama just strengthened the movement ten fold. The NATO meeting will still occur in Chicago allowing the Occupy Movement to fully display their communist wares for all to see in Chicago – the very heart and soul of corruption. The irony is not lost on me that the top dogs who are decrying the 1% are in fact, the 1% themselves. This isn’t about fairness or the wealthy – this is about power.

And what nefarious gathering would be complete without the treasonous Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn combo? Whackiness is sure to follow in multiple dark forms. From Bill Ayers:

The tiny fraternity of concentrated wealth and power that calls itself the Group of Eight (G8) is meeting in Chicago in mid-May, overlapping with representatives of history’s largest global military cohort, NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), the gently self-named military behemoth dominated by the US.

Heads of state, spooks, foreign ministers and generals, cabinet members and secret operatives, advisors and bureaucrats— the 1% of the 1%—plan to gather in barricaded opulent surroundings while coordinating and conspiring to extend and defend their obscene wealth, to exploit the remaining fossil fuels, natural resources, human labor and the living planet to the last drop, and to dominate the people of the global majority.

A 1984-style national security dragnet is descending on the city to attempt to lock Chicago down. Chicago’s Mayor is concocting a culture of fear, suggesting that it is the human resistance to NATO/G8 that represents danger, outside agitators, violence and invasion. Universities and schools are being urged to close early in May; communities of color are told that this is not their concern; merchants are preparing for assault. In reality, NATO/G8 represents the masters of war; it is they who are the greatest purveyors of violence on this earth.

NATO/G8 will not be alone in Chicago: Occupy’s 99% will gather in a festival of life and peace, joy and justice. Two permitted, family-friendly rallies at the Daley Center and marches for justice, jobs and peace are scheduled on May 18 and 19 (and perhaps another on May 21). Music, dance, teach-ins and peoples’ tribunals will overflow the parks and theatres. We will all be there to open Chicago back up. In the spirit of the Arab Spring and Occupy, the Madison labor struggle, the Pelican Bay hunger strikers, teachers and nurses, the Dream youth, returning veterans against the wars, women insisting on reproductive dignity, foreclosure resistance, LGBTQ equality and,many more, Adbusters, CanG8, Code Pink, Portoluz and others have called for people to come from near and far, armed with their spirit and their creativity, pitching their tents and staking their claims.

We’re excited and you’re invited: Come to Chicago, May 18-May 21. Bring a sleeping bag, and if we have room, you can stay with us on the Southside.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel has made it entirely clear that he alone will happily host NATO/G8, but that the 99% are decidedly not welcome. He has funding to further arm and mobilize the police and militarize the city; he has announced plans to contain and suppress demonstrators; he has pushed through legislation that restricts and criminalizes free speech and assembly, and requires insurance for public demonstrations; he is issuing a steady stream of pronouncements about Chicago-under-siege from ominous and dangerous outside forces.

But Chicago is big enough for all—it is after all a nuclear-free and cease-fire city, cradle of the Haymarket martyrs and the 8-hour day, labor and peace actions, vast civil rights and immigration rights manifestations, home of Ida B. Wells Barnett, Jane Addams, Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Studs Terkel. The rich and the powerful do gather here, but Chicago is a public space with historic parks, monuments, neighborhoods and streets for popular mobilizations as well—Chicago belongs to all of us. We underline the right—the moral duty—to dissent and demonstrate, to resist and to be heard, to participatory (not billionaire paid for) democracy. Mayor Emanuel can still change course, and he should; so far he has obstinately and foolishly chosen to frame mid-May solely in military and security terms.

The mayor, not the popular resistance, is creating conditions—once again—for a police riot in Chicago against people who have every intention and every right to assemble peacefully deploying humor and music, art and play, civil disobedience and imagination to forcefully express rejection of imperial and permanent wars, to challenge racial/ethnic/gender discrimination and hate, to demand justice, education, health care and peace, women and gender dignity, the opportunity for meaningful work and reversing epic income disparities, an end to mass incarceration, and the urgent need to shift course and live differently for the sake of the planet and future generations.

Join us in Chicago in May (or, if you can’t come, act in solidarity—Occupy the suburbs, cities, and communities across the land): stand up for civil and human rights, exercise your voice and be a witness, act up and speak out. Be part of a wave of people power, creative direct non-violent action, and the most vast, determined resistance in memory.

History calls!

Occupy the future!

Another world is possible!

Deception, thy name is Ayers. Rahm Emanuel is actually part of the movement, carrying out a brilliantly choreographed chess maneuver to forward the bottom up, top down, inside out endgame of this whole event (or should I say ‘emergency’). The whole movement is classic Cloward and Piven strategy. Overwhelm the system, bring down the nation, control the people. Occupy are the lemmings off the cliff. Revolt, cry havoc! and let slip the dogs of war, whatever it takes… but don’t question your leaders and backers. Certainly don’t look at their motives too closely.

And somewhere in the mix, you can bet Van Jones will appear as a leader if not ‘the leader‘ of the movement.

“You’re going to see an evolution now as you go from protests, keep the protests, but now expand into politics,” Jones said. “And if you thought there was an earthquake in 2010 when the Tea Party moved into politics, wait until this 99 percent movement moves over into politics. You haven’t seen anything yet.”

Jones said the movement is “going to be recruiting 2,000 candidates to run for office now under this 99 percent banner“ as Occupy Wall Street enters ”phase two.”

“Phase two, you move from anger to answers. You move from pointing out the problem to pointing out the solutions,” Jones said. “What you’re going to see now is you have the Occupy movement at the center, that’s the beating heart.”

The Occupy Movement and Anonymous are the poisonous fruit of the American Spring. Everyone that touches it becomes tainted. They are being used by elites such as Piven, Soros, Van Jones, Ayers and Dohrn to bring down our Constitutional Republic once and for all. Their ilk has been at it for over a hundred years and they think victory is so close they can almost taste it.

Conservatives need to unite behind their chosen candidate and stand on strong conservative principles if they are to survive. We cannot be divided and defeat Barack Obama and the machine that supports him. We won’t survive another four years of his Marxist game plan. We need to make sure that the Progressives taste their own poisonous fruit and that we keep to the untainted fruits of our labor while trusting in God and the incredible vision of our founding fathers. Our American Fall needs to be an American Revival that cleans out our halls of government and ushers back in a moral, ethical and prosperous future for America — a harvest of the pure and righteous fruit of the Constitutional garden.

By: Terresa Monroe-Hamilton  -  Hat Tip: Judy W.  -  The NoisyRoom

How the Chicago Team Is Sinking the Obama Presidency

America: A fearsome foursome

By Edward Luce - Published: February 3 2010 20:09 | Last updated: February 3 2010 20:09

The team seen most often in the Oval Office

David Axelrod, senior adviser

A former journalist on the Chicago Tribune who quit to set up a political advertising firm, Mr Axelrod, 54, is Barack Obama’s longest-standing mentor, from his days in Chicago politics. Always at the candidate’s side during the election campaign, he is the chief defender of the Obama brand. Still a journalist at heart, he describes himself as having been “posted to Washington”.

Robert Gibbs, communications chief

The most visible face of the White House for his sardonic daily briefings. Mr Gibbs, 38, is perhaps the least likely member of the circle – he is a career Democratic press officer from Alabama who quit John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign and shortly afterwards went to work for Senator Obama. A constant presence during the campaign, he is also seen as a keeper of the flame.

Rahm Emanuel, chief of staff

The best story about Mr Emanuel, 50, concerns the dead fish he delivered to a pollster who displeased him. The least honey-tongued politician in Washington, he is also one of the most effective. Friends say he is relentlessly energetic, critics that he has attention deficit disorder. He has enemies but even detractors concede he may well achieve his aim of becoming the first Jewish speaker of the House of Representatives.

Valerie Jarrett, senior adviser

An old friend of the Obamas, having hired Michelle to work in Chicago politics in the early 1990s, Ms Jarrett, 53, is probably the first family’s most intimate White House confidante. A former businessperson and aide to Richard Daley, mayor of Chicago, she was briefly considered as a candidate to fill Mr Obama’s Senate seat. She was part of the circle he consulted before running for president.

At a crucial stage in the Democratic primaries in late 2007, Barack Obama rejuvenated his campaign with a barnstorming speech, in which he ended on a promise of what his victory would produce: “A nation healed. A world repaired. An America that believes again.”

Just over a year into his tenure, America’s 44th president governs a bitterly divided nation, a world increasingly hard to manage and an America that seems more disillusioned than ever with Washington’s ways. What went wrong?

Pundits, Democratic lawmakers and opinion pollsters offer a smorgasbord of reasons – from Mr Obama’s decision to devote his first year in office to healthcare reform, to the president’s inability to convince voters he can “feel their [economic] pain”, to the apparent ungovernability of today’s Washington. All may indeed have contributed to the quandary in which Mr Obama finds himself. But those around him have a more specific diagnosis – and one that is striking in its uniformity. The Obama White House is geared for campaigning rather than governing, they say.

In dozens of interviews with his closest allies and friends in Washington – most of them given unattributably in order to protect their access to the Oval Office – each observes that the president draws on the advice of a very tight circle. The inner core consists of just four people – Rahm Emanuel, the pugnacious chief of staff; David Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett, his senior advisers; and Robert Gibbs, his communications chief.

Two, Mr Emanuel and Mr Axelrod, have box-like offices within spitting distance of the Oval Office. The president, who is the first to keep a BlackBerry, rarely holds a meeting, including on national security, without some or all of them present.

With the exception of Mr Emanuel, who was a senior Democrat in the House of Representatives, all were an integral part of Mr Obama’s brilliantly managed campaign. Apart from Mr Gibbs, who is from Alabama, all are Chicagoans – like the president. And barring Richard Nixon’s White House, few can think of an administration that has been so dominated by such a small inner circle.

“It is a very tightly knit group,” says a prominent Obama backer who has visited the White House more than 40 times in the past year. “This is a kind of ‘we few’ group ... that achieved the improbable in the most unlikely election victory anyone can remember and, unsurprisingly, their bond is very deep.”

John Podesta, a former chief of staff to Bill Clinton and founder of the Center for American Progress, the most influential think-tank in Mr Obama’s Washington, says that while he believes Mr Obama does hear a range of views, including dissenting advice, problems can arise from the narrow composition of the group itself.

Among the broader circle that Mr Obama also consults are the self-effacing Peter Rouse, who was chief of staff to Tom Daschle in his time as Senate majority leader; Jim Messina, deputy chief of staff; the economics team led by Lawrence Summers and including Peter Orszag, budget director; Joe Biden, the vice-president; and Denis McDonough, deputy national security adviser. But none is part of the inner circle.

“Clearly this kind of core management approach worked for the election campaign and President Obama has extended it to the White House,” says Mr Podesta, who managed Mr Obama’s widely praised post-election transition. “It is a very tight inner circle and that has its advantages. But I would like to see the president make more use of other people in his administration, particularly his cabinet.”

This White House-centric structure has generated one overriding – and unexpected – failure. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Mr Emanuel managed the legislative aspect of the healthcare bill quite skilfully, say observers. The weak link was the failure to carry public opinion – not Capitol Hill. But for the setback in Massachusetts, which deprived the Democrats of their 60-seat supermajority in the Senate, Mr Obama would by now almost certainly have signed healthcare into law – and with it would have become a historic president.

But the normally liberal voters of Massachusetts wished otherwise. The Democrats lost the seat to a candidate, Scott Brown, who promised voters he would be the “41st [Republican] vote” in the Senate – the one that would tip the balance against healthcare. Subsequent polling bears out the view that a decisive number of Democrats switched their votes with precisely that motivation in mind.

“Historians will puzzle over the fact that Barack Obama, the best communicator of his generation, totally lost control of the narrative in his first year in office and allowed people to view something they had voted for as something they suddenly didn’t want,” says Jim Morone, America’s leading political scientist on healthcare reform. “Communication was the one thing everyone thought Obama would be able to master.”

Whatever issue arises, whether it is a failed terrorist plot in Detroit, the healthcare bill, economic doldrums or the 30,000-troop surge to Afghanistan, the White House instinctively fields Mr Axelrod or Mr Gibbs on television to explain the administration’s position. “Every event is treated like a twist in an election campaign and no one except the inner circle can be trusted to defend the president,” says an exasperated outside adviser.

Perhaps the biggest losers are the cabinet members. Kathleen Sebelius, Mr Obama’s health secretary and formerly governor of Kansas, almost never appears on television and has been largely excluded both from devising and selling the healthcare bill. Others such as Ken Salazar, the interior secretary who is a former senator for Colorado, and Janet Napolitano, head of the Department for Homeland Security and former governor of Arizona, have virtually disappeared from view.

The Hollywood touch

Political scientists credit Ronald Reagan with having managed the best transition from campaigning to governing when he moved to the White House in 1981. While lacking in intellectual skills, Reagan was often a shrewd judge of character. Following his victory in a bitter primary campaign with George H.W. Bush in 1980, Reagan promptly hired his defeated opponent’s campaign manager, James Baker, to be his first chief of staff. Understated but authoritative, Mr Baker is considered one of the most effective performers in that role, to which he brought a good managerial background and an ability to play honest broker.

Administration insiders say the famously irascible Mr Emanuel treats cabinet principals like minions. “I am not sure the president realises how much he is humiliating some of the big figures he spent so much trouble recruiting into his cabinet,” says the head of a presidential advisory board who visits the Oval Office frequently. “If you want people to trust you, you must first place trust in them.”

In addition to hurling frequent profanities at people within the administration, Mr Emanuel has alienated many of Mr Obama’s closest outside supporters. At a meeting of Democratic groups last August, Mr Emanuel described liberals as “f***ing retards” after one suggested they mobilise resources on healthcare reform.

“We are treated as though we are children,” says the head of a large organisation that raised millions of dollars for Mr Obama’s campaign. “Our advice is never sought. We are only told: ‘This is the message, please get it out.’ I am not sure whether the president fully realises that when the chief of staff speaks, people assume he is speaking for the president.”

The same can be observed in foreign policy. On Mr Obama’s November trip to China, members of the cabinet such as the Nobel prizewinning Stephen Chu, energy secretary, were left cooling their heels while Mr Gibbs, Mr Axelrod and Ms Jarrett were constantly at the president’s side.

The White House complained bitterly about what it saw as unfairly negative media coverage of a trip dubbed Mr Obama’s “G2” visit to China. But, as journalists were keenly aware, none of Mr Obama’s inner circle had any background in China. “We were about 40 vans down in the motorcade and got barely any time with the president,” says a senior official with extensive knowledge of the region. “It was like the Obama campaign was visiting China.”

Then there are the president’s big strategic decisions. Of these, devoting the first year to healthcare is well known and remains a source of heated contention. Less understood is the collateral damage it caused to unrelated initiatives. “The whole Rahm Emanuel approach is that victory begets victory – the success of healthcare would create the momentum for cap-and-trade [on carbon emissions] and then financial sector reform,” says one close ally of Mr Obama. “But what happens if the first in the sequence is defeat?”

Insiders attribute Mr Obama’s waning enthusiasm for the Arab-Israeli peace initiative to a desire to avoid antagonising sceptical lawmakers whose support was needed on healthcare. The steam went out of his Arab-Israeli push in mid-summer, just when the healthcare bill was running into serious difficulties.

The same applies to reforming the legal apparatus in the “war on terror” – not least his pledge to close the Guantánamo Bay detention centre within a year of taking office. That promise has been abandoned.

“Rahm said: ‘We’ve got these two Boeing 747s circling that we are trying to bring down to the tarmac [healthcare and the decision on the Afghanistan troop surge] and we can’t risk a flock of f***ing Canadian geese causing them to crash,’ ” says an official who attended an Oval Office strategy meeting. The geese stood for the closure of Guantánamo.

An outside adviser adds: “I don’t understand how the president could launch healthcare reform and an Arab-Israeli peace process – two goals that have eluded US presidents for generations – without having done better scenario planning. Either would be historic. But to launch them at the same time?”

Again, close allies of the president attribute the problem to the campaign-like nucleus around Mr Obama in which all things are possible. “There is this sense after you have won such an amazing victory, when you have proved conventional wisdom wrong again and again, that you can simply do the same thing in government,” says one. “Of course, they are different skills. To be successful, presidents need to separate the stream of advice they get on policy from the stream of advice they get on politics. That still isn’t happening.”

The White House declined to answer questions on whether Mr Obama needed to broaden his circle of advisers. But some supporters say he should find a new chief of staff. Mr Emanuel has hinted that he might not stay in the job very long and is thought to have an eye on running for mayor of Chicago. Others say Mr Obama should bring in fresh blood. They point to Mr Clinton’s decision to recruit David Gergen, a veteran of previous White Houses, when the last Democratic president ran into trouble in 1993. That is credited with helping to steady the Clinton ship, after he too began with an inner circle largely carried over from his campaign.

But Mr Gergen himself disagrees. Now teaching at Harvard and commenting for CNN, Mr Gergen says members of the inner circle meet two key tests. First, they are all talented. Second, Mr Obama trusts them. “These are important attributes,” Mr Gergen says. His biggest doubt is whether Mr Obama sees any problem with the existing set-up.

“There is an old joke,” says Mr Gergen. “How many psychiatrists does it take to change a lightbulb? Only one. But the lightbulb must want to change. I don’t think President Obama wants to make any changes.”

Fewer registered voters nationwide — 44% — currently approve of President Barack Obama’s job performance than disapprove — 47%. When Marist last asked about the president’s approval rating in December, 46% thought well of Obama’s job performance while 44% gave him low marks. Yet he and his inner team seem not to be able to make the changes needed to stop the decline.