America is in the middle of the most dangerous presidency the country has ever seen, conservative icon Phyllis Schlafly warns in a wide-ranging, exclusive Newsmax.TV interview to mark the first 1,000 days of Barack Obama administration.
“He is taking us into socialism just as rapidly as he possibly can,” she said. “He campaigned on the idea of fundamentally transforming the United States and he is doing that.
“He’s doing things that are unconstitutional; he’s trying to rule by executive order; he’s trashed some of our favorite symbols; he calls himself a citizen of the world instead of talking about patriotism and America.
“I hope that we can survive the next year,” added Schlafly, the 87-year-old mother-of-six who founded the Eagle Forum and has been a thorn in the side of the radical feminist movement for half a century.
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Schlafly said she is convinced that Obama is still acting on what he learned when he attended the Socialist Scholars Conference while a student at New York’s Columbia University in 1983. “He really bought into Frances Fox Piven’s strategy which is to load so many people on welfare that he breaks the capitalist system.
“That is what he’s been doing,” she said. “That is what he told Joe the Plumber he wanted to do, redistribute the wealth.”
Schlafly said all polls show that the American public thinks the country is moving in the wrong direction and Washington has to address that problem.
“The average American detects that something is wrong, it’s just going in the wrong way and we don’t want more government dependency.
“One of the very serious problems today is that nearly half of our people are dependent, in whole or in part, on the government for … their living expenses. They don’t pay any income taxes and so they really don’t have a stake in the opportunity society. They are looking for dependency on government and it’s most unfortunate.
“That’s not the way America became a great country,” she pointed out.
“The solution is a drastic cut in spending,” she said, adding that she would end all federal spending on education immediately.
“They’ve spent about $2 trillion on the public schools and the goals were to raise the test scores and to reduce the gap between high income and low income and it’s been a total failure. After all that money they haven’t accomplished anything.
“They should abolish the whole thing – and then college loans. To try to tell every kid that they should go to college is so wrong. College is not for everybody. We have equality of opportunity but we certainly do not have equality of talent. Some people are able to play sports or sing beautifully or get high grades in math or whatever, but we are all not equal in things like that.”
Schlafly said the emphasis placed on college education is partly responsible for shipping jobs overseas and she attacked Obama’s “jobs czar” General Electric chairman Jeffrey Immelt for closing the country’s last incandescent light bulb factory in Winchester, Va. last year with the loss of 200 jobs.
“It’s most unfortunate that millions of our good blue-collar jobs have been shipped over to China,” she said. “Starting jobs in China is not helping America at all.”
Schlafly said what is needed in America right now is “to restore real jobs in private industry” but she said nothing that Obama has done during his first 1,000 days has achieved that.
“When he talks about jobs, he’s talking about more government jobs and that doesn’t get us anywhere. His stimulus plan was pretty much a failure.
The feminists had their tantrum and he gave most the jobs to women, a lot of which were in the educational system or in government and they weren’t shovel-ready jobs by any means.”
And she said Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s comment voting against government funding for abortion, would be a vote “to say that women can die on the floor,” proved the Democrats “are completely in the clutches of the radical feminists.”
Schlafly dismissed the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations as the wrong way for people to get what they want. “That’s not the way if you believe in the democratic system.
“They are making a lot of press, they’re having a lot of good food shipped in – they’re eating well, according to the latest reports – but we don’t solve our problems by street demonstrations. That’s common in other countries and I’m afraid the big television coverage of demonstrations in other lands may have given some people the idea that that’s the way to go here.
“What we must do is to nominate and elect people who will do what the people want, which is drastically cut federal spending and live within our means.”
Schlafly said the only way to halt the march towards socialism is to elect a Republican president in November next year. But she said she does not have a favorite candidate.
“I’m waiting to see who’s got the best plan. We have got a lot of talent in the Republican Party and, in any event, I am in favor of whoever is running against Barack Obama.”
She said she both hopes and believes that Obama will be a one-term president. “He’s got a very low approval rating and the American people know that he is taking us down a path we don’t want to go.
“So I hope that our Republican candidates get their act together and show the alternative and win in 2012.”
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