WorldNetDaily reports that yet another Marxist ideologue has been appointed to an advisory position at the White House.

Obama’s appointment of Ben Scott as Innovation Adviser shows that he is steadily intent on putting an end to the freedom of the internet.

Ben Scott was policy director of the far left Free Press, which is dedicated to the cause of imposing government regulation of the media in general and the internet in particular. Just as their name “Free Press” is Orwellian Newspeak for their aim of suppressing conservative views in the press, so are their words for internet control. “Net neutrality” they call it.

Obviously the chief target of the Free Press Marxists is any medium of conservative opinion: Talk Radio, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, and all of us who speak our minds freely on the internet. But they wouldn’t stop there. They want  total government control of the media.

Aaron Klein, author of the WND report, writes:

Scott authored a book, “The Future of Media,” which was edited by the founder of Free Press, Robert W. McChesney.

McChesney is an avowed Marxist who has recommended capitalism be dismantled.

He is a professor at the University of Illinois and former editor of the Marxist journal Monthly Review. …

The board of Free Press has included a slew of radicals, such as Obama’s former “green jobs” czar Van Jones, who resigned after it was exposed he founded a communist organization. …

Free Press published a study advocating the development of a “world class” government-run media system in the U.S.

Now the group is pushing a new organization, StopBigMedia.com, that advocates the downfall of “big media” and the creation of new media to “promote local ownership, amplify minority voices, support quality [ie. leftist] journalism, and bring local artists, voices and viewpoints to the airwaves.”

To us it is startling to learn that the far left wants to smash “Big Media” when in our eyes Big Media for the most part bends strongly to their side. But even in the New York Times, MSNBC and so on, occasional anti-left views can be read or heard. That won’t do for totalitarians.

Free Press has ties to other members of the Obama administration.

Obama’s “Internet czar,” Susan P. Crawford, spoke at a Free Press’s May 14, 2009, “Changing Media” summit in Washington, D.C.

Free Press is one of the many organizations funded by George Soros and the Joyce Foundation. (Barack Obama sat on the board of the Joyce Foundation, which is one of many charity foundations hijacked by the radical left.)

More on the Free Press can be found at Discover the Networks, including this:

In November 2003, Free Press organized its first National Conference on Media Reform at the University of Wisconsin-Madison …  Z Magazine [far left radical] reported that this conference prominently featured “El Salvador and Palestine solidarity activists” who “gave updates on their work.”

And this:

While many of its conferences have featured speakers advocating a reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine [more Newspeak], Free Press has focused its efforts on advocating for “net neutrality,” progressive legislation that would allow the government greater regulatory control over the Internet.

Even while its founders and conferences call for revolution, the overthrow of the capitalist system, and the socialization of America, Free Press has been regularly granted audiences not only with members of Congress, but with those overseeing media policy at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). For example, when Julius Genachowski, who worked as a prominent leader in Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, became chairman of the FCC (on June 29, 2009), he promptly appointed Free Press spokeswoman Jen Howard to be his press secretary. By late September, three months into his new job, Genachowski announced his plan to push for net neutrality.

In April 2010, the FCC’s net neutrality bid hit a hurdle when a U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that the FCC did not have the right to regulate Comcast’s network management. …

On May 11, 2010, at a Free Press Summit in Washington DC, Democratic Senator Bryon Dorgan gave the keynote speech and declared that critics of net neutrality were simply engaging in the “big lie that permeates public policy today.” He also argued that net neutrality could not be accurately described as a takeover of the Internet, since the Internet was created by the federal government in the first place and already had rules that underpinned net neutrality.

Whatever he meant by “the internet was created by the federal government”, it is worth remembering that the World Wide Web was invented by Sir Timothy Berners-Lee. No innovation comes out of a government-controlled environment. Innovation can only happen where the individual is free. The internet is a sphere of freedom throughout the world, and its existence works strongly against the collectivist tendency that politicians, academics, and all the red-winged minions of the left toil at advancing night and day. And that of course is why these totalitarians want to control it.

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are disciples of the left-revolutionary Saul Alinsky. Hillary Clinton encountered him personally and wrote an academic essay on his theories. Obama never met him but is his political child, faithfully following his intructions for changing the world. To what? An explicit answer cannot be found in the works of radical leftists, but what one gathers and gleans from them is this: an entirely different world in which human beings will not be as they are but transfigured, their nature so utterly changed that they will commit no crimes, never desire to have one thing that everybody else doesn’t have, and will have no aggression, envy, or hate in them. Or something along those lines. The picture of what will be is never apparently clear even in the revolutionary mind itself. A Marx, a Lenin, a Mao, an Alinsky can describe in any amount of detail what hell is – life as it’s lived now, especially in America; but they cannot describe their heaven (see our post Heaven and Hell, December 16, 2009). They require the utter destruction of this world so that the amorphous fantasy, the new world that they cannot visualize will arise on the ruins of the old. All they are sure of is the first step: destroy this world. This they can and will strive to do with fanatical passion. Anything may be done, however unjust, however cruel. Any number of the living may be sacrificed, for their suffering will buy the bliss of that far more worthy future human race.

Alinsky lays out practical steps for achieving the total destruction in his book Rules for Radicals. David Horowitz, the doughty fighter for freedom in general and especially for free speech in the academies, has written a booklet titled Barack Obama’s Rules for Revolution: The Alinsky Model *, in which he explains fully what the Alinsky ethos is, and what tactics Alinskyites will use to create not heaven on earth but chaos.

Here are some quotations from the booklet:

Alinsky’s advice [to his followers] can be summed up in the following way. Even though you are at war with the system, don’t confront it as an opposing army; join it and undermine it as a fifth column from within. To achieve this infiltration you must work inside the system for the time being. Alinsky spells out exactly what this means: “Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people.” In other words, it is first necessary to sell the people on change itself, the “audacity of hope”, and “yes, we can”. You do this by proposing moderate changes which open the door to your radical agendas: “Remember: once you organize people around something as commonly agreed upon as pollution, then an organized people is on the move. From there it’s a short and natural step to political pollution, to Pentagon pollution.”

There is no real parallelism in the war which radicals have declared. One side is fighting with a no-holds-barred, take-no-prisoners battle plan against the system, while the other is trying to enforce its rules of fairness and pluralism. This is the Achilles heel of democracies and all radical spears are aimed in its direction.

At first it might seem paradoxical that an American president who has been the beneficiary of an electoral process second to none in its openness and inclusion should have been a veteran advocate and functionary of an organization like ACORN, which has been convicted of the most extensive election fraud in American history. But this is perfectly intelligible once the Alinsky method is understood. ACORN activists have contempt for the election process because they don’t believe in the electoral system as it is constituted in a capitalist democracy.

The really serious revolutionaries, the ones prepared to burn down the system and put their opponents up against the wall, have never had a plan. What they had – and still have – is a vague idea of the kingdom of heaven they propose to create, in Marx’s case “the kingdom of Freedom”, in Alinsky’s case “the open society”, in the case of the current left, “social justice”. These ideas are sentimental and seductive enough to persuade their followers that it is all right to commit fraud, mayhem and murder – usually in epic doses – to enter the promised land. But otherwise, revolutionaries never spend two seconds thinking about how to make an actual society work. How to keep people from committing crimes against each other; how to get them to put their shoulder to the wheel; how to provide incentives that will motivate individuals to produce wealth.

On this passage two points should be noted: The radical left’s understanding of what “the open society” means is the opposite of what the philosopher Karl Popper meant by it in his great work The Open Society and Its Enemies. Popper meant a society in which individuals are free to strive for their own ends, a society in which Adam Smith’s “natural order of liberty” (or what Karl Marx called, with contempt, “capitalism”) prevails. George Soros, who has benefitted hugely from the real open society of America, spends part of the fortune he has made in it on promoting collectivism with Alinskyite strategems through his “Open Society Institute”. And it should always be remembered that “social justice” is the opposite of justice. “Social justice” means endowing those who have not earned anything with the hard-won gains of those who have.

It must seem simply incredible that the chief enemy of a country should be its own elected president; that the man entrusted to lead it should be waging war on it. Many conservatives cannot bring themselves to believe even in the possibility that Obama – even though he is universally acknowledged to have been an Alinskyite in the past – is still of a mind to wreck the America he’s been elected to lead.

“Chaos”? “Wreck”? – don’t these words vastly exaggerate what’s happening?  But look at what he’s done: set the people against Congress, the states against the federal government, former allies against America; let enemies become dangerously strong; and loaded such a burden of debt on the people as will crush generations to come. Isn’t wrecking and chaos well underway?

Today in Townhall, Michael Medved writes a plea to conservatives not to characterize Obama as a revolutionary, or a radical of any sort. While never actually saying that Obama is not a radical revolutionary, he pleads that it’s politically unwise to say that he is. Here’s how he ends his column (but it’s worth going to the source to read the arguments):

If conservatives persist in characterizing the President of the United States as vicious and radical, insanely bent on the destruction of the Republic, we may find reassurance from the already like-minded but we’ll lose nearly everyone in the persuadable middle. As a result, we could spend the next decade or more as an increasingly impotent, irrelevant and angry opposition, howling in the political wilderness.

We don’t agree in this instance with Michael Medved. Horowitz’s booklet explains at length why it is just such fears that Alinskyites take advantage of. We think it’s time to fight seriously (though not unscrupulously as the radicals fight), and nothing can be won if the enemy isn’t recognized and named.

*Order it from The Freedom Center, PO Box 55089, Sherman Oaks, Ca 91499 Tel: 800-752-6562.

Lynne Stewart is to go to prison for 28 months.

A Clinton-appointed liberal judge considers that sufficient punishment for her crime, which was, in simple truth, treason against the United States of America.

Many on the left admire her. (It is the patriot Sarah Palin whom they hate and scorn.)

The following, from the Norfolk Crime Examiner, San Francisco, provides some details of the case and a profile of this despicable woman:

On Tuesday, the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan ordered convicted criminal defense attorney Lynne Stewart to begin her prison sentence, as the court upheld her 2005 conviction for aiding imprisoned terrorist Omar Abdel-Rahman.

Despite the conviction for such a serious crime, Stewart had been allowed to remain free for the last four years, while her appeal was pending. During that time, she made speeches and numerous public appearances in which she often thumbed her nose at the country she betrayed, while describing terrorists as “liberationists.“

On February 10, 2005, Lynne Stewart was found guilty of conspiracy, providing material support to terrorists and defrauding the federal government. Stewart was contacting al-Gamma’a al-Islamiyya (The Islamic Group) on behalf of Abdel-Rahman. In addition to master-minding the 1993 plot to bomb the World Trade Center which killed six people and left more than 1,000 injured, the blind sheik was convicted of planning to destroy other New York City targets including the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, the United Nations building, and the George Washington bridge. The Islamic Group dubbed the multiple target attack plan “The Day of Terror.” …

Lynne Stewart knowingly aided a convicted terrorist and avowed enemy of the United States during a time of war and deserves to be executed for her crimes. …

Lynne Stewart aided Rahman’s communications with his followers and even personally issued decries on his behalf. Stewart had defended Rahman in his 1995 trial and continued to visit Rahman in prison. Apparently at some point, Stewart ended her role as his lawyer and began one as his co-conspirator. …

Under the guise of giving legal counsel, Stewart helped pass along a fatwah from Rahman to his followers which commanded: “brother scholars everywhere in the Muslim world to do their part and issue a unanimous fatwah that urges the Muslim nations to fight the Jews and to kill them wherever they are.” …

In Rahman’s 1995 trial, Stewart argued that issuing the order to destroy the World Trade Center was merely a necessary part of his religious duties as a Muslim leader. After Rahman was sentenced to life in prison plus an additional 65 years, Stewart was seen weeping uncontrollably inside the courtroom.

Federal prosecutors filed court papers which said Stewart’s crime was in fact, “egregious, flagrant abuse of her profession, abuse that amounted to material support to a terrorist group, which deserves to be severely punished.”

Amazingly, while U.S. District Judge John G. Koeltl said Stewart’s actions could have had “potentially lethal consequences” and represented “extraordinarily severe criminal conduct,” the Clinton-appointed judge waited until October 2006 to sentence Stewart…A full 20 months after her conviction.

Though Stewart could have received a 30 year sentence under federal guidelines (which the prosecution sought), Judge Koeltl only sentenced her to 28 months. In an insulting move to the victims of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, he has even allowed her to remain free while her appeal is pending. …

Lynne Stewart seems to have a particular affinity for murderers and enemies of the state. Over her career, she has defended Black Panther Willie Holder, Weather Underground terrorist Kathy Boudin, Philadelphia cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal, and mafia hit-man Sammy “The Bull” Gravano. Stewart has even expressed a desire to defend Osama bin Laden.

In a 2003 speech to the National Lawyers Guild, Stewart listed Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, and Mao Tse Tung as “heroes.”

In 2002, Stewart told reporter Susie Day of Monthly Review: “I don’t have any problem with Mao or Stalin or the Vietnamese leaders or certainly Fidel locking up people they see as dangerous. Because so often, dissidence has been used by the greater powers to undermine a people’s revolution.”

She went on to talk about her client Abdel-Rahman, by saying: “Now, certainly somebody like Sheikh Omar, who was a world figure, someone who was listened to by the entire Muslim population for being a very learned scholar, deserved to have a platform, deserved not to be entombed in the middle of America and not able to speak. They said the Sheikh was responsible for, I dunno, everything except flat feet. They made it sound like a worldwide conspiracy… He’s a blind, elderly, sick man. He may be a spiritual head …  But he’s certainly not a combatant in any sense whatsoever.” …

Though she has been disbarred, Stewart has become a regular speaker at several law schools. In 2003, one such event at Oregon’s Portland State University Law School was billed as “Lynne Stewart vs. John Ashcroft.” Another engagement at the Arizona State University School of Law was entitled “Emphatically Not Guilty.” A Stanford University speech was canceled by Law School dean Kathleen Sullivan, when she learned of Stewart’s advocacy of violence.

Stewart is certainly not without her admirers. According to the IRS, left-wing activist George Soros gave Stewart a $20,000 donation for her legal defense. In addition to money, Stewart also receives honors. In 2003, the law students at City University of New York voted to honor her with that school’s Public Interest Lawyer of the Year award. However, once news of the award was picked up by the press, the dean thought better of it and rescinded the offer.

Stewart has remained defiant and filled with hatred for the United States. Stewart’s official website (www.LynneStewart.org) states that her prosecution is “an obvious attempt by the U.S. government to silence dissent, curtail vigorous defense lawyers and instill fear in those who would fight against the U.S. government’s racism.”…

Stewart is as hypocritical as she is unrepentant. She has said that she approves of Fidel Castro “locking up” dissidents, but complains that the U.S. government has prosecuted her to “silence dissent.” Apparently, imprisonment is fine when communists use it against those who speak out for their freedom, but somehow wrong when it is used by a democratic republic against their enemies.

However, while Stewart seems to relish the role of dissident martyr, she is neither a dissident, nor is she a martyr. She is in fact, a convicted felon who has aided and abetted a terrorist leader and his organization. Period.

It is more than outrageous that Border Patrol Agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean who sat in prison for two years, for shooting a drug smuggler, were not allowed to remain free while their appeals were pending (as is customary for law enforcement officers charged with crimes relating to the performance of their job), though Lynne Stewart who knowingly and willfully gave aid to a terrorist was given that courtesy.

While a lengthy sentence for someone who has colluded with the enemy during a time of war is of course not without precedence, it is also not without precedence that one could be put to death for this crime. Had Lynne Stewart committed her crime during World War II or even the early days of the Cold War, she would have undoubtedly been hanged for her actions.

Stewart however, has been the beneficiary of a federal bench heavy with left-leaning judges and a political climate which now has a great tolerance for what our parents and grandparents knew to be treason.

Every single day which Lynne Stewart was allowed to give speeches, talk to magazines, attend swanky dinners for some leftist cause, and sign autographs for adoring college students was a terrible affront not only to those who were killed and maimed in the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, but to every man and woman who has ever fought and died for this country. 

President Obama will bow to foreign heads of state – the Saudi ‘king’, the Emperor of Japan – but not to public opinion in America.

Michelle Malkin writes:

President Obama traveled all the way to China to praise the free flow of information. It’s the only safe place he could do so without getting heckled. With a straight face, Obama lauded political dissent and told Chinese students he welcomed unfettered criticism in America. Fierce opposition, he said, made him “a better leader because it forces me to hear opinions that I don’t want to hear.”

How do you say “You lie!” in Mandarin?

While the kowtower-in-chief’s press shop feeds paeans to free speech into Obama’s globetrotting teleprompter, the White House is still waging war on vocal foes at home. Obama has lectured his critics in Washington to stop talking and “get out of the way.” He has stacked his carefully staged town halls with partisan stooges and campaign plants throughout the year. …

There are now more muzzled watchdogs in the Obama administration than on the sidelines of the Westminster Kennel Club show. …

In China, O proclaimed himself “a big supporter of non-censorship.” But his FCC “diversity” czar, Mark Lloyd, is bent on re-engineering public airwaves by redistributing free speech rights from conservative haves who earned their success to minority have-nots who demand talk radio entitlements in the name of “media justice.”

And among Obama’s closest advisers is a husband-and-wife duo who specializes in marginalizing and stifling the Democratic Party’s most effective enemies. Just days after White House interim communications director Anita Dunn — the administration’s resident Mao cheerleader and Fox News-basher — stepped down to take a planned role as a “consultant” behind the scenes, her husband, Robert Bauer, stepped up and shoved aside White House counsel Greg Craig.

The problem? Former Clinton lawyer Craig wasn’t tough enough for Chicago-on-the-Potomac. Obama needed an intimate ally who will put hardball politics ahead of policy and the law. Bauer fits the bill.

A partner at the prestigious law firm Perkins & Coie, Bauer served as counsel to the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and Obama for America. He has served as Obama’s personal attorney, navigating the corrupted waters of former Democratic Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s pay-for-play scandals in Illinois. He also served as legal counsel to the George Soros-funded 527 organization America Coming Together during the 2004 campaign.

That get-out-the-vote outfit, helmed by Patrick Gaspard (the former Service Employees International Union heavy turned Obama domestic policy chief), employed convicted felons as canvassers and committed campaign finance violations that led to a $775,000 fine by the Federal Election Commission under Bauer’s watch. 

During the 2008 campaign, Bauer pooh-poohed GOP complaints about voter fraud. While decrying the Republicans’ “fear message,” it was Bauer who was on a fear-inducing crusade — pulling out all legal stops to silence conservative critics of Obama’s ties to the radical left.

As I’ve noted previously, and in light of Obama’s self-serving praise for political dissent abroad, I note again: It was Bauer who lobbied the Justice Department unsuccessfully last fall to pursue a criminal probe of American Issues Project (AIP), an independent group that sought to run an ad spotlighting Obama’s ties to Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers.

It was Bauer and his legal goon squad who attempted to sic the DOJ on GOP donor Harold Simmons and sought his prosecution for funding the ad. In a parallel effort launched the same week as Bauer’s legal efforts, a nonprofit called “Accountable America,” spearheaded by a former operative of the Obama-endorsing MoveOn outfit, began trolling campaign finance databases and targeting conservative donors with “warning letters” in a thuggish attempt to depress Republican fundraising.

It was Bauer who tried to bully television stations across the country into pulling the spot. Team Obama then summoned their troops to bombard stations, many of them owned by conservative-leaning Sinclair Communications, with 93,000 e-mails to squelch the commercial.

With Bob “The Silencer” Bauer now working from the inside and Anita “News Commissar” Dunn working from the outside, Obama has a state media police apparatus the Chinese regime itself could love.

If starving isn’t unhealthy, what does the word ‘unhealthy’ mean?

There are powerful persons who believe with fanatical conviction that (other) people should starve to death rather than eat something ‘unhealthy’.

As a result, millions are deprived of food.

Even Bill Gates protests about this state of affairs. We say ‘even Bill Gates’, because he usually goes along with the thinking of those who believe in government control of individual lives, aka socialists. (See in the quotation below a list of lefty organizations he supports.)  He doesn’t seem to realize that he is one of the greatest benefactors of mankind ever, through supplying billions of people with something they want: the products of Microsoft, which are put to trillions of productive uses throughout the world. Doing so –  as a model capitalist – has rightfully made him rich, and he has no moral obligation to redistribute his wealth in a secondary and much feebler attempt to do good. But he apparently thinks there is, perhaps out of some unwarranted feeling of guilt.

Whatever prompts him, he has undertaken to alleviate the chronic hunger of whole populations in Africa. And he has run into an impediment: the adoption, by stupid African rulers, of two Western ‘progressive’ notions: that people must be made to eat healthy food, and that genetically modified foods are unhealthy.

This article is from FrontPageMag:

The left-of-center philanthropist says starving Africans should be allowed to eat genetically modified foods.

Bill Gates took on the Famine Lobby while addressing a forum on the world food supply in Iowa. Speaking at the World Food Prize Symposium in Des Moines, Gates took aim at the chorus of environmental leftists and organic food advocates who believe Africans should starve rather than eat genetically modified (GM) foods. “Some voices are instantly hostile to any emphasis on productivity. They act as if there is no emergency, even though in the poorest, hungriest places on earth, population is growing faster than productivity,” he said.

The opposition is significant, because Gates is left-of-center himself. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, with assets of $29 billion as of 2005, has focused on the “population” side of the “problem” in the past, sending billions of dollars in grants to such pro-abortion groups as Planned Parenthood; Population Action International, Population Services International, the Alan Guttmacher Institute, and the Population Resource Center. Gates has also financed such organizations as the [Soros supported] Tides Center, the Tides Foundation, the National Council of La Raza, and has supported a gun control initiative in Washington state.

However, Gates announced he will issue a $120 million grant to increase food productivity in sub-Saharan Africa through the planting of genetically modified seeds. In Des Moines, Gates cited a Stanford study from 2008 concluding African farmers will lose one-quarter of their productivity within 20 years if they continue to plant the same strains of corn. However, “If the seeds perform well, African farmers can expect to produce two-million more tons of maize in a year of moderate drought.” Radio Iowa reports Gates has “committed more than a billion dollars” in all.

In proposing this initiative, he is standing up to the Green Left, which has long favored environmental “purity” [over] human well-being. Greenpeace cooked up the term “Frankenfood” to demonize genetically modified foods a decade ago. …

Dire predictions aside, GM foods not only potentially increase food production but have replaced the need to spray crops with chemical pesticides, which sickened or killed Africans. Those farmers who spray can now streamline the process, saving them much time and money. The modified crops are more resistant to cold, drought, herbicides, pests, and disease. They also supplied nutritional gaps in the consumption patterns of the poor. For instance, so-called “golden rice” spliced Vitamin A into rice, which could stave off blindness among the world’s poor who eat little more than rice. …

Greenpeace has long claimed GM foods increase allergies; however, the World Health Organization – hardly a corporate, capitalist shill – concluded, “No allergic effects have been found relative to GM foods currently on the market.” Although six EU nations ban GM foods, Jaap Satter, a senior policy adviser at the Dutch Agriculture Ministry, has said, “You cannot say anymore that there is a scientific reason to be against genetic modification.” The National Research Council summed up the situation: “no conceptual distinction exists between generic modification of plants and microorganisms by classical methods or by molecular techniques that modify DNA and transfer genes.”

Some environmentalists seem concerned the foods will be too successful at feeding the poor. Al Gore has worried, “The most lasting impact of biotechnology on the food supply may come not from something going wrong, but from all going right…we’re far more likely to accidentally drown ourselves in a sea of excess grain.” Given the environmentalist movement’s hatred of population – best exemplified by Obama Science Czar John Holdren’s justification of compulsory abortion in the United States – this may be the real locus of their disdain.

So deep is the Green Left’s hatred of GM foods that even an organization Gates founded has given genetically modified food a chilly reception. “The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa was established by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation” and the Rockefeller Foundation in 2006 “with the objective of improving agriculture in Africa.” However, its leader, former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan, vowed in 2007: “We in the alliance will not incorporate GMOs [genetically modified organisms] in our programmes. We shall work with farmers using traditional seeds.”

The scare tactics and shunning of American and Euro-socialist leftists is theoretical and faulty – but their mania has reaped a deadly harvest among the world’s most vulnerable people.

In 2002, Zambian President Levy Mwanawasa refused to accept tons of U.S. food aid for his starving nation, because the aid contained genetically modified food (maize, specifically). “Simply because my people are hungry, that is no justification to give them poison, to give them food that is intrinsically dangerous to their health,” he said. The deluded president continued, “I will not allow Zambians to be turned into guinea pigs no matter the levels of hunger in the country.”

The levels of hunger were staggering. Nearly one-third of Zambia’s 10 million people faced famine. Some 14 million Africans faced starvation region-wide. Nonetheless, the president privately upbraided officials in the UN World Food Programme for distributing GM foods, which fed 125,000 people in five camps. The WFP reported some impoverished Zambians “resorted to eating little more than twigs and ash from the fire in a brown soupy concoction.” Desperate, rural villagers broke into the palace where the stockpiles were rotting and stole 2,000 bags of maize.

In response, the World Summit on Sustainable Development, held in Johannesburg in 2002, signed a “statement of solidarity” with Zambia. Charlie Kronick of Greenpeace went further, alleging the humanitarian aid constituted a sick capitalist ploy. “There is a constant drip of pressure from the U.S. government and biotech industry to make sure Africa is softened up for GM,” he theorized. “Europe is closed to them and they need a market for it.”

Others offered more than ideological support. Zimbabwe joined the boycott, preventing GM grain’s importation. Angola followed suit in 2004. Lesotho and Mozambique milled all such grain so it would not be planted and “infect” other crops.

Not all were limited to the EU and Africa. In 2004, Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez passed “possibly…the most sweeping restrictions on transgenic crops in the western hemisphere.”

At home, the opposition has been remarkably well-heeled. National Review’s Deroy Murdock found:

In 2001, the 30 leading anti-biotech groups…spent $341.4 million, including Greenpeace USA’s expenditure of $23,748,737, Environmental Defense’s $38,794,150 and the Natural Resources Defense Council’s $41,625,882. Between 1996 and 2001, this crusade’s lavish underwriters included the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation ($11,906,500), the Ford Foundation ($39,978,020) and the Pew Charitable Trusts ($130,996,900).

It also included a large portion of the organic food market. Somehow, this story of an industry trying to spike a competitor did not make MSNBC or the pages of Mother Jones.

Whatever the dangers, the prohibition of GM foods is a moral issue. As Velasio De Paolis of the Pontifical Urban University has said, it is “easy to say no to GM food if your stomach is full.” However misled he is on other issues, Bill Gates deserves credit for standing up against the Green Left on this point.

But on another, closely related, issue he has so far failed to take the right stand:

The question remains, will he do so on the issue that seems closest to his heart: the eradication of malaria in sub-Saharan Africa? In a recent speech on the topic Gates admitted, “two tools helped to bring the death rate down: One was killing the mosquitoes with DDT.” Before Rachel Carson’s crusade – based entirely on scientific theories that never panned out – DDT use had nearly eradicated malaria. Now, according to one report, “there are approximately 350 to 500 millions cases of malaria, killing close to one million people” annually. “Every day, malaria takes the lives of 2,000 children in Africa alone.” Yet instead of backing DDT use, Gates has sought to find a vaccine.

If Gates truly wants to put the well-being of Africans above political correctness, DDT is the best place to start.

Now in the US, as always  in socialist states, the many, for whom the collectivist and redistributionist policies are ostensibly enacted, suffer; while the few who hold the the reins of power benefit beyond the dreams of avarice.

Tait Trussell reports at Front Page Magazine:

President Obama is adept at rewarding those who put him into office. And hard-left financier George Soros is emerging as a leader of the patronage pack.

A payback to Soros was due. As the chief moneyman behind left-wing political action committees like MoveOn.org, Soros, an early supporter of Obama, played an instrumental role in drumming up voter mobilization and political advertising on the novice candidate’s behalf. In no small part, Obama’s triumph in the Democratic primary over better-known rivals was a testament to Soros’s deep pockets and his political commitment.

Now it’s time for Soros to collect on his investment. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that the Obama administration has committed up to $10 billion to Brazil’s state-owned oil company Petrobras to finance oil exploration off of Brazil’s coast… The company just happens to be the largest holding in Soros’s investment fund. Soros’s connection to the company is no secret; he has been investing in Petrobras since 2007. A profitable venture, Petrobras has estimated recoverable reserves for the so-called Tupi oil field of between 5 and 8 billion barrels. With his billion-dollar loan, Obama has taken patronage politics to striking new level… The president has elected to help another nation with the same type of drilling that he opposes so vehemently for this country, and the reason seems to be Soros’s $811-millon investment in Petrobras.

The Petrobras loan may be a windfall for Soros and Brazil, but it is a bad deal for the US. The administration is prepared to lend up to $10 billion to a foreign company to drill off its coast, when it could bring in $1.7 trillion in government revenue, as well as create thousands of new jobs, by allowing drilling off the coast of the United States.

This is no empty speculation. The American Petroleum Institute estimates that oil exploration in the U.S. could create 160,000 new, well-paying jobs, as well as $1.7 trillion in revenues to federal, state, and local governments, all while fostering greater energy security. Federal data from the Minerals Management Service of the U.S. Department of Interior says the U.S. has enough oil and natural gas to fuel more than 65 million cars for 60 years, and enough natural gas to heat 60 million homes for 160 years. In fact, the government estimates that there are 30 billion barrels of undiscovered technically recoverable oil on federal lands currently closed to development. But rather than investing in the country’s energy future, the administration seems to be offering an expensive kickback to a political ally in a time of economic recession and high unemployment.

The oil deal stinks for other reasons, as well. For instance, there is the rank hypocrisy of Soros – an enthusiastic proponent of global warming theory and environmental liberalism – investing in the fossil fuels whose use he otherwise condemns – and doing so in part with the aid of taxpayer funds. For years, Soros has urged the adoption of a global carbon tax that would punish companies that contribute to global warming. But that didn’t prevent him from plowing money into Petrobras…

With his backing for a billion-dollar oil loan to a Brazilian company, the president has proven more generous to Soros than to the American voters who put him in office.

Matthew Vadum writes:

President Obama’s new “green jobs” czar Van Jones, an avowed militant communist, had been on the board of the pressure group Apollo Alliance, which aspires to flatten the U.S. economy by having government fund “green jobs” scams, according to the “Glenn Beck Program” earlier this week.

Even worse, the group, which has ties to ACORN, SEIU, and Center for American Progress president John Podesta, has significant pull in Congress and helped to write the stimulus bill.

The Apollo Alliance “is designed to bring together the elements of organized labor with the community organizers with the green groups, the environmental groups, and to access all of the big foundation money that’s been supportive of those causes in the past,” explained Phil Kerpen, director of policy for Americans for Prosperity.

Jones described the group’s “mission as sort of a grand unified field theory for progressive left causes; it ties all these things together,” Kerpen said. He added:

“They really admire the Apollo mission, the moon-shot mission, and they think that we need  a similar centrally-planned, organized massive mobilization to reorder society and take control of energy and their various other objectives. They admire that and they want it like a moon shot.”

Apollo Alliance was co-founded by Campaign for America’s Future, the George Soros-funded organization that supports an ever-expanding welfare state.

Beck asked if Wade Rathke, the disgraced founder of ACORN who was expelled by the radical left-wing group last year for covering up his brother’s embezzlement of nearly $1 million in ACORN funds, had been a member of the Apollo Alliance’s board.

Kerpen responded, “Yes. He’s on — he was until this year on the board of the Tides Foundation and the Tides Center, which are the parent organizations that host the Apollo Alliance.”