Faced with political division regarded by some as worse than at any time since the Civil War, a broken economy, unprecedented national debt, abuse of executive power, an out-of-control judiciary and collapsing public morals, American voters overwhelmingly backed the Republican Party in the midterm elections, clearly signaling a desire to return to the nation’s founding principles.
Yet before the new Congress could even be seated – with the largest GOP House majority in 70 years and a new Senate majority – Republicans conceded to Democrat desires and passed a $1.1 trillion spending bill, forgoing opportunities to shut down President Obama’s executive amnesty and curb Obamacare.
House Speaker John Boehner
That “betrayal,” as many conservative activists have called it, is the No. 1 underreported story of 2014, as selected by the WND editors with the help of the news site’s readers.
At the end of each year, many news organizations typically present their retrospective replays of what they consider to have been the top news stories of the previous 12 months. WND’s editors, however, long have considered it more newsworthy to publicize the most underreported or unreported news events of the year.
WND Editor and CEO Joseph Farah has sponsored “Operation Spike” every year since 1988, and since founding WND in May 1997, has continued the annual tradition.
Here are the 2014 picks:
1. Republican betrayal of midterm voters
For longtime conservative activist Richard Viguerie, the Republican congressional leadership’s budget deal with President Obama after historic GOP gains in the 2014 midterm elections was nothing short of a monumental betrayal.
“I don’t know any other way to say it than that they lied to the American voters,” Viguerie told WND.
A conservative leader for more than 50 years, he often is called the movement’s “funding father” because of his innovative work with direct mail fundraising.
“The first impression they made was to betray the voters, betray their landslide victory and surrender,” Viguerie said. “They just absolutely surrendered to an exceedingly unpopular president; so, shame on them.”
In response, more than half-a-million Americans have joined a WND campaign to urge GOP members of the House to replace Speaker John Boehner
A letter from each participant in the campaign will go to each Republican member stating that two issues have “prompted Americans to turn in droves to the Republican Party in November 2014.”
The issues were Obama’s “blatantly unconstitutional executive action to provide amnesty to millions of illegal aliens, and the deliberately deceptive restructuring of America’s health-care system through Obamacare, which threatens to unravel the greatest health delivery system in the world.”
2. Obamacare lies
By the time videos of the candid admissions of Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber surfaced, it already was clear to many Americans that Obama wasn’t truthful when he promised they could keep their doctor, they could keep their health-care policy, their costs would go down $2,500 a year and the annual deficit and the overall debt would drop.
Now, here was the mind behind the Affordable Health Care Act admitting not only that Obama’s declared promises weren’t true but that the crafters of the law knew that the only way the bill could pass would be to mask its features and hide the true intent of its authors.
Jonathan Gruber
Despite previous praise of Gruber as the architect of their plan, Obama and fellow Democrats desperately tried to distance themselves from him after the video excerpts were exposed, dismissing him as someone who “never worked on our staff.”
Obama suggested he barely knew Gruber, but a PBS interview shows Gruber revealing the president was present in sessions in which deception was discussed as a political tool.
When Gruber was called to testify before a House panel in December, Democrats scheduled a press conference at the same time to unveil a highly partisan report of “torture” by the CIA during the George W. Bush administration.
And when establishment media reported Gruber’s testimony, the focus was on his apology for calling Americans “stupid,” as if that were the real offense.
Largely lost in the coverage was the fact that Gruber’s “glib” talk, as he put it to the House panel, made it clear that a small group of highly educated elitists believe it’s necessary to deceive the people, because the people would foolishly reject what’s good for them. The elitists, in their minds, only want the best for the country, and, some day, the people may come to realize the brilliance of their plan and thank them for benevolently rescuing them from their ignorance.
In the first of at least seven videos that surfaced in 2014, Gruber admitted Obamacare “was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes” and declared “lack of transparency is a huge political advantage.”
“Basically you know call it the stupidity of the American voter, or whatever, that was really, really critical to get the thing to pass,” he said.
Just before the New Year, an October 2009 policy brief by Gruber was unearthed in which he admitted the Affordable Care Act would definitely not be affordable. Produced while he was writing the bill and while Obama was declaring premiums would drop dramatically, the brief said Obamacare had no cost controls in it.
Talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh, meanwhile, saw a major lie at the heart of Obamacare that had gained little notice.
He pointed to a Gallup poll that found 70 percent of Americans “remain generally positive about the quality of health care they personally receive, their health-care coverage and what they pay for health care.”
That means, Limbaugh explained, that the stated reason for Obamacare – the claim that the whole health-care system is broken and unfixable – was wrong.
“Everybody’s been sold a bill of goods,” he said. “Most people are and have been very happy with the current health-care system.”
His brother, WND columnist and author David Limbaugh, wrote that the lies undergirding Obamacare were chronicled years ago, noting that before the bill was passed in 2009, the chief actuary of the Medicare program estimated “14 million people would lose their employer coverage under Obamacare, even though many will want to keep it.”
Gruber’s glibness also exposed that fact that the purpose of the “Cadillac tax” on premium health insurance plans was to discourage employers from providing health insurance. The goal would be achieved, Gruber said, by “mislabeling it, calling it a tax on insurance plans rather than a tax on people, when we all know it’s a tax on people who hold those insurance plans.”
Obama had insisted, in a 2009 interview with ABC News, the individual mandate was not a tax. But in 2012, White House attorneys argued before the Supreme Court that it was tax, which was the only way it could comply with the U.S. Constitution.
WND columnist Jack Cashill recalled Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., was widely reviled for shouting to Obama during the 2009 State of the Union address, “You Lie!” in reaction to the president’s declaration that his proposed health law would not insure illegal aliens.
Cashill noted Wilson “had to feel vindicated when a report surfaced in 2014 that 42 percent of new Medicaid signups were immigrants, legal and otherwise.”
3. President Obama’s sleight-of-hand to grant amnesty to millions of illegal aliens
Everyone knows that after repeatedly insisting he didn’t have the power to change immigration laws and effectively grant amnesty to millions of illegal aliens, President Obama went ahead and signed executive orders doing just that.
Or did he? The reality, as first reported by WND senior staff reporter Jerome Corsi, is that Obama used a sleight-of-hand in an apparent attempt to avoid constitutional conflicts, ordering a series of memoranda instead, including a key memo by Department of Homeland Security Director Jeh Johnson.
Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., a leading opponent of Obama’s immigration policy, caught on to the president’s maneuvering, ridiculing the administration for not carrying out the action through an executive order.
“I guess they just whispered in the ear of Johnson over at Homeland Security, ‘Just put out a memo. That way we don’t have to enforce the law,’” Sessions said:
As a result of the president’s use of a memo instead of an official order, the senator observed: “We don’t even have a really significant, direct, legal direction that we can ascertain, precisely what the president is doing. It’s a stunning event in my view.”
Sessions believes the result was “the creation of a new, alternative immigration system” despite the fact the president “is not empowered to do that.”
He noted the president had publicly acknowledged more than 20 times in recent years that he did not have the constitutional authority to unilaterally implement amnesty. As the senator read excerpts of Obama’s own words, members of the audience laughed aloud at how much those words differed from the president’s actions.
The president should simply uphold the Constitution as it is, Sessions said, “not as he wishes it would be.”
4. President Obama’s ‘enemies list’
In 2013, the Obama administration drew heat for seizing two months of telephone records of reporters and editors at the Associated Press. Then came the revelation of extensive Obama Justice Department spying on Fox News reporter James Rosen, including tracking his movements and seizing two days of his personal emails.
Sharyl Attkisson
This year, an explosive new book by former CBS News reporter Sharyl Attikisson put more of the pieces together, presenting evidence that the Obama White House, not unlike the notorious Nixon administration, has an “enemies list” of reporters and activists who threaten its agenda.
Attkisson, who has filed a lawsuit against the Obama administration, said in an interview an internal email indicates “reporters who were working with leakers in government agencies or perceived as enemies of the White House are being targeted.”
Attkisson’s complaint alleges the Department of Justice and the White House monitored her because of her investigations into the Fast and Furious scandal.
In her book, “Stonewalled,” she said she obtained information from a government-linked source that the FBI, among other agencies, “had hacked into both her personal and work computers over a lengthy period of time.”
Attkisson, who has won an Emmy and the Edward R. Murrow award for investigative reporting, said both her CBS computer and personal iMac were repeatedly hacked and its files accessed, including one on Benghazi. She said “the interlopers were able to co-opt my iMac and operate it remotely, as if they were sitting in front of it.”
The Fast and Furious gun-running scandal produced another member of Obama’s enemies list.
The Justice Department’s inspector general found that a high-ranking Obama political appointee destroyed the credibility and career of John Dodson, a special agent for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives who infuriated his superiors by alerting Congress about the scheme.
WND CEO Joseph Farah saw Obama developing an enemies list at the beginning of his administration. Austan Goolsbee, then chairman of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, let it slip that he knew more than he should about the tax structure of Koch Industries, one of the primary funders of tea-party activity, including Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks.
Three years later came the revelation that in the heat of his re-election campaign, Obama’s Internal Revenue Service was impeding the fundraising of conservative and tea-party political action groups by targeting their applications for tax-exempt status with intensive scrutiny.
5. Racial strife created by Obama administration
As an African-American who rose to the pinnacle of his profession as director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Dr. Ben Carson is in a position to assess racial relations in America, and he thinks that despite the hope of a great leap forward with the election of Barack Obama in 2008, relations actually have gotten worse.
Al Sharpton and President Obama
“I actually believe that things were better before this president was elected. And I think that things have gotten worse because of his unusual emphasis [on race],” he told radio host Hugh Hewitt.
Carson, regarded as a possible 2016 presidential candidate, cited, among other examples, Obama’s pre-judgment of the police incident with black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates incident, the Trayvon Martin case and the effort of progressives to “manipulate, particularly minority communities, to make them feel that they are victims.”
The president “absolutely” plays the race card, he said.
WND columnist Larry Elder pointed to Attorney General Eric Holder’s insertion into the Ferguson, Missouri, case before a grand jury eventually chose to bring no charges against police officer Darren Wilson for the death of black teen Michael Brown.
Holder told a group of black leaders in Ferguson: “I am the attorney general of the United States. But I am also a black man. I can remember being stopped on the New Jersey Turnpike on two occasions and accused of speeding. … I remember how humiliating that was and how angry I was and the impact it had on me.”
Elder pointed out the long-believed claim of “racism” by officers on the New Jersey Turnpike had been investigated and debunked twice.
The columnist noted that more than 20 years ago, black liberal Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson said: “The sociological truths are that America, while still flawed in its race relations … is now the least racist white-majority society in the world; has a better record of legal protection of minorities than any other society, white or black; offers more opportunities to a greater number of black persons than any other society, including all those of Africa.”
Holder, however, Elder wrote, sees an America mired in the 1950s when it comes to race.
In another column, Elder offered a summation of how many blacks who once had high hopes for their future under Barack Obama now assess their situation.
Rioting in Ferguson, Missouri
A black 82-year-old grandmother, a lifelong Democrat, called C-SPAN to explain why she “voted straight Republican” in the midterm election.
“I have noticed … what the Democratic Party has done to my people,” she said. “Unemployment is high in the black community – we are double with unemployment – than it is anywhere else. … And I’m not talking about the people that need help – because with so many people getting help that doesn’t need help, it prevents the people that really need help from getting it.
“I hear my people calling in all the time saying that every time you say something against the ideology of President Obama, that you’re doing it because he is black,” she continued. “We need to stop that foolishness.
“This man is destroying this country, and it’s what he intended to do. He said he was going to transform America, and that’s what he’s doing.”
In the wake of the murder of two New York City police officers in December, a former NYPD officer who also served as a Secret Service agent for President Obama didn’t mince words.
Dan Bongino blasted New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, Obama, Holder and activist Al Sharpton as race “hustlers” who are partly to blame for the assassination.
New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton and Mayor Bill de Blasio attend a NYPD graduation ceremony
“The people who have made their careers off of political division and implying racism where it doesn’t exist, No. 1, have really destroyed credibility in actual cases of racism that should be investigated, should be pursued to every extent legally possible, and then secondly, they’ve incited people,” Bongino said in a Fox News interview. “Yes, I do put some of this on them.”
He noted that de Blasio, in his speech following the death of Eric Garner, who died of a heart attack after a police officer held him around his neck because he was resisting arrest, emphasized historical examples of racism in America.
Bongino acknowledged the history but argued that in “the context of a police-involved incident, the Garner incident … there’s zero evidence whatsoever that that incident had any element of racism in it at all.”
“Oddly enough,” Bongino said, “he’s implying that all police officers, all, were judging people on the color of their skin. And then he’s telling people to go out and judge police officers on the color of their uniform?
“I mean, this is not leadership, these people have no credibility anymore.”
WND’s Gina Loudon, who went to Ferguson for a week to report, found that within days of the death of Michael Brown, leftist activists from outside of Ferguson set up a protest campaign office in the city, which enduring days of looting and violence both after the shooting and after the grand jury cleared the officer.
“Almost immediately, what started as ‘peaceful protests’ escalated into rampant looting,” she wrote. “The local state senator, a black Democrat, took to the airwaves demanding justice. She would later make the ominous promise that violence would ensue were Officer Darren Wilson not charged and convicted – he wasn’t, and it did.”
6. Militarization and nationalization of local police
The Ferguson riots drew attention to the Pentagon’s 1033 program to help arm local law enforcement agencies with surplus military equipment. Ferguson also prompted a major surge in distribution of lethal firearms, with the the federal government shipping nearly 4,000 more assault rifles to local law enforcement agencies in the subsequent three months.
Trade shows enable communities to obtain unused military vehicles and weapons, including the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office and Military Police Regimental Association trade show in Oakland, California, and the Military Police Expo in Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri.
Oakland was the site of citizen and police turmoil during the Occupy protests, while the Missouri site is about 150 miles west of Ferguson.
Critics cite studies such as a newly released University of California at Berkeley examination of 192 protests held in 2011 concluding that when officers use aggressive tactics, protesters reacted aggressively. Even the uniforms officers used could be a cause for violence, the study suggests.
And John Whitehead, president of the Rutherford Institute, who has sued police departments for SWAT tactics, wrote that incidents of misuse of military equipment “are no longer warning signs of a steadily encroaching police state.”
“The police state has arrived,” he said.
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“For those like myself who have studied emerging police states, the sight of a city placed under martial law – its citizens under house arrest (officials used the Orwellian phrase ‘shelter in place’ to describe the mandatory lock-down), military-style helicopters equipped with thermal imaging devices buzzing the skies, tanks and armored vehicles on the streets, and snipers perched on rooftops, while thousands of black-garbed police swarm the streets and SWAT teams carry out house-to-house searches – leaves us in a growing state of unease,” he wrote.
WND’s first reports on the militarization of local police date to within months of the news site’s launch in 1997, when founder and CEO Joseph Farah wrote of a training session for armed federal officers for the Environmental Protection Agency.
Describing a new multi-million-dollar training facility that was schooling thousands of federal employees, he wrote: “Critics of the growing militarization of the federal government will also take no comfort in the fact that the center’s program was designed with the help of a team of experts from the U.S. military.”
The warnings now are being echoed by activists from both ends of the political spectrum.
Former Democrat congressman Dennis Kucinich, a self-described progressive, wrote in the left-leaning Huffington Post that the militarization of police needs to be reined in.
“We are at a moment of national crisis in the way our domestic law enforcement is being conducted,” he wrote. “The killing of an unarmed civilian by a law enforcement officer is, sadly, not unique. But the police response to the protests has provided a powerful cautionary moment for America. The militarization of local police has led to the arrival today in Ferguson of the actual military, the National Guard.”
Whitehead said “a police state does not come about overnight.”
“It starts small, perhaps with a revenue-generating red light camera at an intersection. When that is implemented without opposition, perhaps next will be surveillance cameras on public streets. License plate readers on police cruisers. More police officers on the beat. Free military equipment from the federal government. Free speech zones and zero-tolerance policies and curfews. SWAT team raids. Drones flying overhead,” he wrote.
“No matter how it starts, however, it always ends the same … all-out tyranny.”
7. Muslim persecution of Christians in the Middle East
At the beginning of 2014, Open Doors’ World Watch List monitoring persecution of Christians found the number of Christian martyrs was twice as high in 2013 as the year before. Islamic governments and groups once again were responsible for the vast majority of deaths and persecution around the world.
In the Middle East in 2014, the rise of ISIS, the self-declared “Islamic State,” in Syria and Iraq spelled disaster for Christians. An estimated 12 million Christians live in the Middle East, but that number has been thought to have decreased drastically since the ISIS summer takeover of nearly half of Iraq, including the city of Mosul, which had been home to Christians for 2,000 years.
ISIS has executed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Christians throughout Iraq and forced many to flee the country.
A joint conference between the International Christian Embassy in Jerusalem and the World Jewish Congress in Jerusalem was held to discuss the dire situation for Christians.
Father Gabriel Nadaf, who has campaigned for Christian Arab rights and for local Christians to support Israel, told the United Nations Human Rights Council in September that across the Middle East in the last decade, an estimated 100,000 Christians have been murdered each year.
“That means every five minutes a Christian is killed because of his faith,” he said.
“Those who can escape persecution at the hands of Muslim extremists have fled. … Those who remain, exist as second if not third-class citizens to their Muslim rulers.”
In Egypt, Coptic Christians have been targeted by violence from the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafi groups. There have been reports of church burnings and killings of Christians.
In Syria, al-Qaida-linked rebels have threatened to kill Christians who do not join the fight against President Bashar Al-Assad.
Iran has persecuted Christians relentlessly, as well, recently making headlines for burning the lips of a Christian man caught eating during the Ramadan fast.
On Christmas Day in Iran, nine Christians were arrested in a raid on a house church meeting and transferred to an unknown location.
In October, ISIS declared through its propaganda booklet “Dabiq” that its No. 1 enemy is Christianity.
The cover photo shows a black ISIS flag flying over the Vatican. The booklet describes the terrorist army’s desires to conquer Rome and “break the cross.”
According to some Islamic traditions, the Islamic prophet Muhammad predicted that the occupation of Istanbul, Jerusalem and Rome would pave the way for the Islamic messiah or mahdi.
In August, Rep. Trent Franks, R-Ariz., who leads the International Religious Freedom Caucus in the House, blasted President Obama and his administration for playing politics with Christian persecution and failing to prevent a handful of terrorists from growing into the powerful ISIS army now rampaging across Iraq.
Pointing out the extreme dangers Christians face worldwide, he said Obama administration officials “only respond when the politics become so antithetical to them that they have to.”
Franks cited the case of Meriam Ibrahim, who was sentenced to die for her Christian faith in Muslim Sudan but later released. He also noted Saeed Abedini, the American pastor imprisoned in Iran; the Boko Haram Islamic jihadists in Nigeria; the Muslim Brotherhood persecution of Christians in Egypt; and ISIS.
“The bottom line is if you don’t have religious freedom, there’s no hope for any other kind of freedom,” Franks said. “Religious freedom’s the cornerstone of all other freedoms.”
A report in late December by a British-based Syrian activist group found ISIS had killed 1,878 people in Syria during the previous six months, the majority of them civilians.
8. New scientific findings that further undermine global warming fraud
President Obama believes “global warming,” now more commonly referred to as “climate change,” is the “one issue that will define the contours of this century more dramatically than any other.”
Pope Francis plans to publish an encyclical on “climate change” that will inspire action at the 2015 United Nations meeting in Paris. He contends “climate change, the loss of biodiversity and deforestation are already showing their devastating effects in the great cataclysms we witness.”
But scientific findings continue to refute the widespread claim that the “debate is over” and there is a “consensus” among scientists that mankind is destroying the planet.
Former congressional aide Marc Morano, executive director of ClimateDepot.com, summed it up in a Dec. 30 Fox News interview.
“The pope has picked a contentious scientific issue which – now going on almost two decades of no global warming, sea ice recovering, sea level rise actually decelerating,” he said. “On every metric from polar bears on down, the global warming narrative has weakened. And to now have the pope jump no that bandwagon would sow confusion among Catholics.”
Indeed, the Remote Sensing Systems, which provide data to NASA, NOAA and the National Science Foundation, show the global mean surface temperature of the Earth has not risen for 18 consecutive years despite a 9 percent increase in CO2.
The “scare” of global warming from the use of carbon fuels and other human activities “is over,” contend scientists at the Chicago-based Heartland Institute.
“This extends the so-called ‘pause’ in global warming to a new record, one not predicted by the climate models of the United Nations’ International Panel on Climate Change,” the organization said.
Craig Idso, senior fellow in environment for the Heartland Institute and co-editor of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, a counterpart to the U.N.’s IPCC, said it’s “time for global warming diehards to face the facts.”
“Think about that. Over this time period the air’s CO2 content has risen some 40 parts per million, which represents fully one-third the total global CO2 increase since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, yet contrary to model projections, planetary temperatures have failed to rise,” Idso said.
Skeptics of the theory that humans are causing catastrophic global warming are often derided as “deniers,” akin to deniers of the World War II Holocaust. But Idso said the supporters of “climate change” need to “stop denying the models have got global temperature projections wrong.”
“Stop denying CO2 has a lower climate sensitivity than you have been claiming. Stop denying the societal benefits of continued fossil fuel use. It’s not too late to make a course correction and support sound science,” he said.
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Tom Harris, executive director of the International Climate Science Coalition, pointed out that in 2008, the NOAA “State of the Climate” report specified exactly what observations would indicate whether the models are reliable or not: Fifteen years of no warming.
In 2009, he noted, climate scientist Phil Jones agreed, telling a colleague in one of the infamous leaked Climategate emails: “Bottom line: the ‘no upward trend’ has to continue for a total of 15 years before we get worried.’”
Alan Caruba of the National Anxiety Center said that after 18 years of observing no increase in average global temperature, it’s bad enough that the IPCC and its defenders won’t concede they were wrong, and the media won’t report it.
“But the worst of this 18-year anniversary of the lack of warming is the fact we have a president, a secretary of state and others in the Obama administration who continue not only to proclaim warming – now called climate change – but suggesting that it is the greatest threat to the nation and the world,” he said. “The absurdity of this should hold them up to ridicule, but these pronouncements are published without criticism.”
Scientist Art Robinson has spearheaded the Petition Project, which has gathered the signatures of more than 30,000 scientists who agree that there is “no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.”
Robinson, who has a Ph.D. in chemistry from Cal Tech, where he served on the faculty, co-founded the Linus Pauling Institute with Nobel-recipient Linus Pauling, where he was president and research professor. He later founded the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine.
He told WND that weather does change over time and that the global system goes through cycles, some slightly warmer and some slightly cooler than others.
Right now it’s cooler, he said.
9. The agenda of Common Core
There’s a battle over the federal Common Core State Standards Initiative for public schools, with supporters labeling opponents “right-wing nuts” and “black helicopter” types.
But the ad hominem attacks only reinforce the claim of opponents that Common Core is the product of progressive elitists who want to put all children under control of federal government bureaucrats. The opponents point to many other examples, such as the liberal think-tank Center for American Progress discounting them as only a “tiny minority,” claiming such views should be ignored because “the children belong to all of us.”
An election in Indiana in 2012, however, demonstrated the scope of the opposition when conservative activists in the Republican-majority state helped a liberal, union-supported opponent of Common Core defeat an incumbent Republican who favored the standards as state educational superintendent.
As WND reported in a four-part, in-depth series, the opposition from teachers, states, parents and students has made the term Common Core toxic.
Funded with $350 million from the Department of Education, 45 states have adopted the standards, motivated by “Race to the Top” grants and waivers from No Child Left Behind. Yet while President Obama devoted almost a tenth of his State of the Union speech to education – touting his administration’s takeover of the student loan business and the restoration of cuts to education – he didn’t breathe a word about Common Core.
Common Core is the brainchild of the National Governors Association, the Council of Chief State School Officers and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
As WND reported, to understand why the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers have been pushing for a set of national educational standards, it is instructive to recall that the NGA authored President George H.W. Bush’s AMERICA 2000 education goals, an effort to line up America’s education policies with the World Declaration on Education for All, a set of global education goals from a 1990 U.N.-sponsored summit. Former President Bill Clinton’s education reform agenda, Goals 2000, incorporated the same goals, as did George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act.
In every presidential reform program, there has been one common thread: America must prepare its students to be good workers to ensure that America can compete in the global economy.
The goal is not to ensure America’s children are prepared to live full and meaningful lives as virtuous citizens who love God and their country. Children are viewed as future workers who are essential to the country’s economic advancement. Therefore, it is the government – not parents – who should determine how they should be educated.
The battle over Common Core has now spread to 30 states, where legislation has been or will be introduced to delay implementation, abolish the Core Standards or, at a minimum, set up a task force to study the issue before full implementation takes place.
“Common Core is part of the agency to keep true reform from happening in this county,” said Dr. Terrence Moore, author of “The Story Killers: A Common Sense Case Against the Common Core.”
Asked who will benefit, he said, “The people who are not going to profit and thrive are the children. School will become even more boring than it is, and they will be unable to think or have any cultural heritage or moral inheritance to draw upon in order to grow and thrive.”
Instead, Moore said, those who will profit are the progressives pushing this program.
More and more people are joining the fight against it as parents and concerned citizens realize what’s at stake is the complete makeover of America’s schools in the image of Common Core. And in all likelihood, homeschools and private schools will eventually be required to follow the national standards.
Governors in Oklahoma, South Carolina, Indiana and Louisiana have taken steps to distance themselves from Common Core, either by working with their state legislatures or by taking unilateral action.
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal
Gov. Bobby Jindal filed a lawsuit against the Obama administration in federal court alleging the Department of Education illegally manipulated grant money and regulations to force states to adopt the Common Core standards.
Some of the problems reported by parents include political and “inappropriate assignments,” advertising inside of tests, the elimination of input from local school boards and the development of a database detailing private information on every student.
The 400 individual data points for each student include health conditions, religion, voting status, income, likes and dislikes.
The information, “through a complicated network of contracts and agreements, can then be shared with the federal government, contractors, researchers and other outside agencies.”
Former congressman and WND columnist Tom Tancredo wrote that defeating Common Core is “a necessary first step because this battle to preserve our country’s heritage must be fought and won on a local and state level, not as a battle over federal dollars used to bribe states into following federal mandates.”
He noted that even the Republican National Committee has adopted a resolution calling for the rejection of the Common Core standards, and pundits called it “toxic” for candidates in the 2014 midterm elections.
The Cardinal Newman Society, an organization promoting “faithful Catholic education,” said Common Core is “nothing short of a revolution in how education is provided, relying on a technocratic, top-down approach to setting national standards that, despite claims to the contrary, will drive curricula, teaching texts, and the content of standardized tests.”
“At its heart, the Common Core is a woefully inadequate set of standards in that it limits the understanding of education to a utilitarian ‘readiness for work’ mentality,” the organization said.
One of North Carolina’s largest school districts condemned the College Board’s new Advanced Placement history curriculum, which has direct ties to Common Core, calling it a deeply biased, inaccurate and revisionist version of American history.
David Coleman, known as the architect of Common Core and its chief pitchman, is the president of the College Board, a private company based in New York that owns the SAT and ACT exams as well as the Advanced Placement, or AP, exams and curriculum.
“Coleman is now re-writing every College Board product to align with Common Core,” said Meg Norris, a retired public-school teacher in Hall County, Georgia, and an anti-Common Core activist in that state.
The College Board not only owns the AP curriculum but it administers the AP standardized tests nationwide to K-12 students, measuring their readiness to attend college.
10. An estimated 93 million American adults are not working while the government declares only 5.8% of Americans are unemployed.
WND long has reported the true unemployment rate is in double-digits when the number of workers who are working part-time or have dropped out of the labor force are taken into account.
The unavoidable truth is that more that 93 million Americans 16 and older have not participated in the labor force this year.
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According to John Williams, an economist known for arguing the government reports manipulated “shadow statistics” of economic data for political purposes, decreases in the unemployment rate as reported by the BLS have become virtually “meaningless.”
Williams argues the real unemployment rate for November, for example, was 23 percent.
Williams has contended the Obama administration intentionally manipulates unemployment numbers to understate the economic pain still being caused by an economic recovery that is anemic, at best, in terms of jobs creation.
In his monthly subscription newsletter ShadowStats, Williams explained precisely how the Obama administration methodology for calculating the monthly unemployment rate differs from traditional economic calculations used by previous administrations.
“The broad economic outlook has not changed, despite the heavily distorted numbers that continue to be published by the BLS,” Williams wrote. “The unemployment rates have not dropped from peak levels due to a surge in hiring; instead, they generally have dropped because of discouraged workers being eliminated from headline labor-force accounting.”
Williams recreates a ShadowStats Alternative unemployment rate reflecting methodology that includes “long-term discouraged workers” that the Bureau of Labor Statistics in 1994 under the Clinton administration removed from those considered “unemployed” in any of the government’s unemployment measures.
In August 2013, the House Ways and Means Committee documented that seven of every eight new employees under Obama have been part-time employees, as approximately 90 percent of all jobs created in the U.S. economy since 2009 have been part time.
In December, billionaire real-estate mogul Donald Trump dismissed the Obama administration’s employment figures as “phony” in an interview on the Fox News morning show “Fox and Friends.” Trump affirmed that the administration is regarding people who give up looking for a job as employed.
“The unemployment numbers in this country are so false. Everybody knows it. Everybody laughs about it,” he said. “But the president gets away with it; and other politicians get away with it.”