Tuesday, September 29, 2009
BARACK OBAMA
The Cost of Obama's Copenhagen Trip
A reader adds a few points to my back-of-the-envelope math on the cost of President Obama's trip to Copenhagen to lobby the International Olympic Committee and (probably?) witness the announcement that Chicago will host the 2016 games.
The cost of Obama’s trip will not be close to $1 mil. It is well over $10 mil if it is a dime. The figures you quoted (accurately) are for flying a VC-25 (Presidential 747). Presidential trips require both 747s, as one is a backup. However, the costs soar when you realize that from the moment a POTUS indicates he wants to go somewhere, dozens, if not hundreds of people start preparing every detail. These details include security, communications, protocol, logistics that boggle the mind and transportation that most people never see. Several Air Force cargo planes of equipment are loaded and flown to the destination with armored limos, security personnel from the Secret Service and the relevant military branches, fuels specialists, etc. A National Airborne Operations Command Post 747 from Offutt AFB, NE will accompany him to keep POTUS in constant communications in case of national or word emergency . . . We are now up to three 747s, multiple cargo planes and costs for personnel who fly commercial ahead of POTUS. If FLOTUS flies separately, add a C-32 (757) for her and her staff, entourage, hangers-on etc, with attendant security, logistics, etc. Add a few more million dollars, though many personnel in Denmark will cover preparations for both POTUS and FLOTUS.
Air Force One is a perk for all Presidents and I hesitate to criticize their use and cost. Bill Clinton flew the wings off Air Force One, but I criticized him for his policies, behavior and attitudes toward what he considered the benighted peasants of this country. He is the head of his party and, all Presidents use AF 1 liberally, as they should. Moreover, we need to keep him safe at all times and in contact with whomever is needed. AF 1 is like the medieval king arriving to fanfares of trumpets and bringing the majesty of the office (however tarnished by recent occupants) to all destinations. Despite Obama’s words and best efforts, we are still the dominant country on Earth and any President is both head of state and head of government. Let the trumpets sound upon any POTUS’ arrival.
Obama’s trip to Copenhagen to bring the Olympics to my hometown is both stupid and unnecessary as half of Chicago does not want them. It will be the ultimate trough for the piggish politicians in Chicago to bury their collective snouts in corruption. However, I encourage all conservatives to go after Obama on the substance of the trip, not the cost of flying there. We shall soon have conservative POTUS and he or she will use AF 1. Let’s not justify the inevitable criticism from the lunatic left about use of AF 1.
When I mentioned the cost yesterday, my aim was to note the financial, time, and opportunity costs for the president. I have a hard time believing Obama would take this trip halfway around the world if there was any chance he will be left standing as they announce that Rio is getting the games. I suspect the IOC has given the White House a wink and a nod, so to speak.
As to whether Chicago should get the Olympics, I'm undecided. I attended and enjoyed the Atlanta Games in 1996, but I also know hosting the games has enormous costs and headaches for the locals. It's a chance to shine on the world stage, but it also brings all normal economic activity in your city to a grinding halt for about a month. You end up building a decent amount of infrastructure that will rarely be used to that extent again; there's rarely enough ability to get around the city; and of course, you become a target for terrorism.
Bottom line, this seems like small potatoes for a president with a full plate. As Ed puts it, "Barack Obama has decided to put his international influence on the line not to push for more support in Afghanistan or sanctions on Iran, but to act as Salesman in Chief for Chicago and its Olympics bid for 2016."
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
The Boxer-Kerry green boondoggle
The Boxer-Kerry green boondoggle
By Michelle Malkin • September 30, 2009 10:37 AM
Expensive eco-hysterics take to the Senate floor today. Democrat Sens. Barbara Boxer and John Kerry are set to unveil their “climate change” plan this morning.
The Institute for Energy Research has posted the two advance drafts of the bill and provides helpful analysis.
Except, of course, for the parts where Boxer and Kerry have inserted numerous placeholders — a phenomenon we saw in the House version of the cap-and-tax bill:
From these drafts it appears that the Boxer-Kerry bill will dramatically increase regulation, provide new entitlements to politically-connected groups, and give corporate rent-seekers a new source of Federal dollars. As a result of Boxer-Kerry, the American people will be forced to endure higher energy prices and onerous regulation.
Apparently, Senators Boxer and Kerry understand the difficulties they will face in passing a cap-and-trade bill this year. It seems that, in order to create leverage to secure more votes, the drafts do not completely spell out how the carbon dioxide allowances will be allocated. Instead the draft bills contain many placeholders…
…After the first draft bill was leaked, and appeared in a story in Greenwire, an updated draft was leaked. This second draft did not contain as many placeholders as the first, instead it gives the EPA Administrator discretion to allocate many of the allowances. This still gives Senators Boxer and Kerry bargaining power to allocate allowances to politically preferred groups.
But it also raises an important question—if Congress needs to act to limit the damage of EPA regulating carbon dioxide under the Clean Air Act, how is the second Boxer-Kerry draft an improvement over EPA regulation? This is especially important because the Boxer-Kerry draft does not limit EPA authority to regulate greenhouse gases using the Clean Air Act.
***
In case you missed Boxer vs. Harry Alford, Round 2, the video is here.
Here’s a round-up of reaction to the “radioactive” Boxer-Kerry proposal.
And via the Green Hell blog, here’s how Boxer’s paying off GE:
Section 821(c) requires that, by December 12, 2012, the EPA set standards for greenhouse gas emissions from “new aircraft and new engines used in new aircraft.”
General Electric is the world’s largest manufacturer of commercial and military jet engines, a business worth about $12 billion in annual revenues.
So the Boxer bill would compel airlines and the military, when purchasing new aircraft and new aircraft engines, to purchase more expensive “green” engines made by GE, according to standards set by the current and GE-lobbied Obama administration.
Keep in mind that GE CEO Jeff Immelt is member of President Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Council.
By Michelle Malkin • September 30, 2009 10:37 AM
Expensive eco-hysterics take to the Senate floor today. Democrat Sens. Barbara Boxer and John Kerry are set to unveil their “climate change” plan this morning.
The Institute for Energy Research has posted the two advance drafts of the bill and provides helpful analysis.
Except, of course, for the parts where Boxer and Kerry have inserted numerous placeholders — a phenomenon we saw in the House version of the cap-and-tax bill:
From these drafts it appears that the Boxer-Kerry bill will dramatically increase regulation, provide new entitlements to politically-connected groups, and give corporate rent-seekers a new source of Federal dollars. As a result of Boxer-Kerry, the American people will be forced to endure higher energy prices and onerous regulation.
Apparently, Senators Boxer and Kerry understand the difficulties they will face in passing a cap-and-trade bill this year. It seems that, in order to create leverage to secure more votes, the drafts do not completely spell out how the carbon dioxide allowances will be allocated. Instead the draft bills contain many placeholders…
…After the first draft bill was leaked, and appeared in a story in Greenwire, an updated draft was leaked. This second draft did not contain as many placeholders as the first, instead it gives the EPA Administrator discretion to allocate many of the allowances. This still gives Senators Boxer and Kerry bargaining power to allocate allowances to politically preferred groups.
But it also raises an important question—if Congress needs to act to limit the damage of EPA regulating carbon dioxide under the Clean Air Act, how is the second Boxer-Kerry draft an improvement over EPA regulation? This is especially important because the Boxer-Kerry draft does not limit EPA authority to regulate greenhouse gases using the Clean Air Act.
***
In case you missed Boxer vs. Harry Alford, Round 2, the video is here.
Here’s a round-up of reaction to the “radioactive” Boxer-Kerry proposal.
And via the Green Hell blog, here’s how Boxer’s paying off GE:
Section 821(c) requires that, by December 12, 2012, the EPA set standards for greenhouse gas emissions from “new aircraft and new engines used in new aircraft.”
General Electric is the world’s largest manufacturer of commercial and military jet engines, a business worth about $12 billion in annual revenues.
So the Boxer bill would compel airlines and the military, when purchasing new aircraft and new aircraft engines, to purchase more expensive “green” engines made by GE, according to standards set by the current and GE-lobbied Obama administration.
Keep in mind that GE CEO Jeff Immelt is member of President Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Council.
Preparing for Panic
Preparing for Panic: ACORN, AIG, Cloward-Piven, and assorted coincidences (Updated)
March 22, 2009 by Procrustes
Basic RGBRBO has written a number of times the past months about the interconnectedness of ACORN, SEIU and the other unions, and various entities based on the Cloward-Piven Strategy (more below), to which we can now add AIG.
John Batchelor’s excellent post AIG Kulaks has prompted a wealth of response regarding various aspects of the AIG “situation”, including several items posted in today’s RBO News & Views — The Kulaks Revolt Edition.
But there are a lot more astute observations and insights to be shared. So, read the following, mark them for future reference, and — most and best of all — pass them on.
Investigating “control” and “redistribution” of the wealth
1-1-1-pujo1Turning first to John Batchelor’s article that was originally posted on his blog, Mark Maps remarked in the comments:
And so it begins…the war on capital and excellence and achievement. Those who have “too much” must be brought down because they damage the self-esteem of the underachievers and excite the greed of our political clown-class, the hollow men. Where and when will it end…at the bottom, in a vast grey wasteland, from sea to shining sea…with a wimper, not a bang.
Lou Filliger added:
“So it begins” with the Pujo hearings, 1912. So it continues with the AIG hearings, 2009. The socialists are preparing for the celebration of 100 years of virtually uninterrupted rule in this country. The lie that my parents told me when I was a child that this was a free country, has been the hardest lie to unlearn.
The actual name for the “Pujo hearings” is The Money Trust Investigation, which, in their textbook American Government, James Q. Wilson and John J. DiIulio, Jr. identify as the “Concentration of control of money, and consequently of credit.”
In a corporate governance timeline posted May 22, 2002, at MarketWatch, Jon Friedman wrote:
1912 — Congress holds the Pujo hearings, looking into J. Pierpont Morgan and his bank’s stranglehold over American industry through board representation and financing deals.
According to the Wikipedia article on the history of the Federal Reserve:
The hearings continued for a full year and were led by the Subcommittee’s counsel, Democratic lawyer Samuel Untermyer, who later also assisted in preparing the Federal Reserve Act. The “Pujo hearings” convinced much of the populace that America’s money largely rested in the hands of a select few on Wall Street.
1-1-1-aig-testify1Justin Fox wrote March 6 at TIME about some of the dissimilarities in the handling by Congress of the Pujo and AIG cases:
The 20th century saw two great Congressional inquiries into financial misbehavior—the Pujo hearings of 1912-1913 and the Pecora hearings of 1933-1934. The essential characteristic that both shared, other than their names begin with “P,” was that the questioning was done not by blowhard members of Congress but by very smart New York lawyers hired by Congress: Samuel Untermyer in 1912-1913 (Arsene Pujo of Louisiana was the chairman of the subcommittee that held the hearings, but he let Untermyer do the talking) and Ferdinand Pecora in 1933-1934. So far all we’ve gotten from this crisis are some disappointing hearings where elected officials—most of them with little knowledge and no prosecutorial skills—ask the questions. But both the Pujo and Pecora hearings did come several years after the financial collapses they were meant to investigate (the Panic of 1907 in Pujo’s case, in case you were wondering), meaning that we’ve still got lots of time.
Background on the AIG “juggernaut”
1-1-1-aig1Pundita recommends the three-part series of reports in The Washington Post by staff writers Robert O’Harrow Jr. and Brady Dennis. She comments:
The articles, which could be Pulitzer Prize material, ran from December 29-31, 2008. To my knowledge the best publicly-available background on how AIG became a juggernaut. Beautifully written, also. A joy to read.
o The Beautiful Machine
o A Crack in The System.
o Downgrades and Downfall.
The Cloward-Piven Strategy
1-1-1-cloward-pivenAnother commenter at John Batchelor’s blog, bortog, wrote:
Two left-wing Columbia University professors named Cloward and Piven mapped out the techniques for destroying democracy by overburdening government with spending. Barack Obama was groomed from childhood in this school of thought.
Follow the lineage of American socialism from Cloward-Piven, through Saul Alinsky, to Frank Marshall Davis and his protege, Barack Obama.
Kurt Nimmo, in his March 10 Infowars well-linked and informative article, Obama, the Cloward-Piven Strategy, and the New World Order, linked to Brannon Howse’s March 9 Worldview Radio interview with former White House budget analyst and author James Simpson.
Howse introduces his MP3 podcast with Simpson, “Barack Obama is “Destroying Our Economy on Purpose,” thusly (emphasis added):
Description: A pair of radical Columbia University professors by the name of Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven wrote an article in the radical magazine known as The Nation. The article was published on May 2, 1966 and laid out what is now known as the “Cloward-Piven Strategy”. The plan calls for the destruction of capitalism in America by swelling the welfare rolls to the point of collapsing our economy and then implementing socialism by nationalizing many private institutions. Cloward and Piven studied Saul Alinsky just like Hillary Clinton and President Obama. Listen as Brannon and his guest James Simpson explain how Cloward and Piven inspired the creation of ACORN that Obama worked for as a community organizer. This interview must be e-mailed all over the country. Americans must awaken and understand the goal of these radicals and what is to come if they succeed. Time is of the essence. Obama is not over his head as some have claimed; he knows exactly what he is doing. Understand the Cloward-Piven Strategy, the rules of Saul Alinsky and their Cultural Marxist worldview and you will understand that what is occurring is not by mistake.
DiscoverTheNetworks reports:
Inspired by the August 1965 riots in the black district of Watts in Los Angeles (which erupted after police had used batons to subdue a black man suspected of drunk driving), Cloward and Piven published an article titled “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty” in the May 2, 1966 issue of The Nation. Following its publication, The Nation sold an unprecedented 30,000 reprints. Activists were abuzz over the so-called “crisis strategy” or “Cloward-Piven Strategy,” as it came to be called. Many were eager to put it into effect.
In their 1966 article, Cloward and Piven charged that the ruling classes used welfare to weaken the poor; that by providing a social safety net, the rich doused the fires of rebellion. Poor people can advance only when “the rest of society is afraid of them,” Cloward told The New York Times on September 27, 1970. Rather than placating the poor with government hand-outs, wrote Cloward and Piven, activists should work to sabotage and destroy the welfare system; the collapse of the welfare state would ignite a political and financial crisis that would rock the nation; poor people would rise in revolt; only then would “the rest of society” accept their demands.
The key to sparking this rebellion would be to expose the inadequacy of the welfare state. Cloward-Piven’s early promoters cited radical organizer Saul Alinsky as their inspiration. “Make the enemy live up to their (sic) own book of rules,” Alinsky wrote in his 1972 book Rules for Radicals. When pressed to honor every word of every law and statute, every Judaeo-Christian moral tenet, and every implicit promise of the liberal social contract, human agencies inevitably fall short. The system’s failure to “live up” to its rule book can then be used to discredit it altogether, and to replace the capitalist “rule book” with a socialist one. [...]
Their article called for “cadres of aggressive organizers” to use “demonstrations to create a climate of militancy.” Intimidated by threats of black violence, politicians would appeal to the federal government for help. Carefully orchestrated media campaigns, carried out by friendly, leftwing journalists, would float the idea of “a federal program of income redistribution,” in the form of a guaranteed living income for all — working and non-working people alike. Local officials would clutch at this idea like drowning men to a lifeline. They would apply pressure on Washington to implement it. With every major city erupting into chaos, Washington would have to act.
This was an example of what are commonly called Trojan Horse movements — mass movements whose outward purpose seems to be providing material help to the downtrodden, but whose real objective is to draft poor people into service as revolutionary foot soldiers; to mobilize poor people en masse to overwhelm government agencies with a flood of demands beyond the capacity of those agencies to meet. The flood of demands was calculated to break the budget, jam the bureaucratic gears into gridlock, and bring the system crashing down. Fear, turmoil, violence and economic collapse would accompany such a breakdown — providing perfect conditions for fostering radical change. That was the theory.
Robert E. Weir writes in his “Class in America” (screenshot from page 616 in Google book):
1-1-1-piven-21-1-1-piven-1
Here you can listen to Frances Fox Piven interviewed February 6, 2008, by Harold Channer:
“Weight of the Poor”
Both DiscoverTheNetworks and Robert Weir, in his “Class in America”, mention that the title for the Cloward-Piven article includes the phrase “weight of the poor.” It should surprise no one that this comes directly from Leon Trotsky, who complained in Chapter 8 of his 1927 “Platform of the Joint Opposition” (emphasis added):
The League of Communist Youth in the country is more and more losing its proletarian and poor peasant support. Its cultural and economic work in the country has for its main object the development of individual farms. The relative weight of the poor is systematically falling everywhere – in the general composition of the rural branches, in the active membership, in the nucleus composed of party members. Along with the continual diminishing of the influx of young town workers, the League is filling up in the countryside with middle and well-off peasant youth.
As in the town, so also in the country the tendency of the petty-bourgeois elements to get hold of the leadership of the League is growing. The group of clerical workers and “miscellaneous” is playing a more and more considerable role, especially in the rural organizations.
But is this not what has happened and continues to happen with Leftie agitator groups such as Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Project Vote, and all the Socialist/Marxist/Communist organizations with which the Unprez and his supporters are affiliated? Membership in these groups is not comprised of “the poor” — they are professionals and college students. SDS alumni such as Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, Carl Davidson, Mike Klonsky, and an endless list of aging 1960s radicals who either participated in Weather violence, hence going Underground to escape arrest, or continued along the radical activist path, were then and are now anything but “the poor”. White middle-to-upper class radicals don’t qualify.
For more on Ayers-Dohrn, SDS and Weather, see RBO’s Ayers-Dorhn Resource List; for more on the various Socialist/Marxist/Communist groups, see RBO’s The Obama Socialist/Marxist/Communist Reader.
More Cloward-Simpson and AIG
The following Cloward-Simpson Strategy chart is included in Simpson’s Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis, posted September 28, 2008, at American Thinker.
acorn-network
You can also read Simpson’s articles on the Cloward-Piven Strategy posted at FrontPage.com’s ‘American Daughter’ blog:
* Part I: Manufactured Crisis.
* Part II: Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis.
* Part III: Conspiracy of the Lemmings.
Uppity Woman forwarded the link for Steve Gilbert’s March 21 post Cloward-Piven, ACORN And AIG Witch Hunt at Sweetness & Light, which links back to Gilbert’s previoius posts, The Many Tentacles Of ‘Cloward-Piven’ (which includes the DiscoverTheNetworks profile on Cloward-Piven) and How The Left Is Spinning The Bank Crisis, both also posted March 21.
In the latter-named article, Gilbert opened with:
With the Obama ascendency it is all too easy to be consumed with the rush of news of the latest outrage against our republic. Consequently, we seldom have time to step back and reflect on the larger issues of the day.
So we thought we would take the time to post articles that are not necessarily ripped from the headlines of the day, but which address the more fundamental movements and trends behind them.
Gilbert draws our attention to an unlikely coincidence:
Notice how the people who espouse the ‘Cloward-Piven Strategy’ run like a scarlet thread through the organizations that figure so largely in the housing and banking – and voting – scandals.
Note too how President Obama, a confessed Alinsky acolyte, worked for the Cloward-Piven inspired “Project Vote” project. In fact, it is one of his proudest achievements.
For a good background on Barack “Alinsky” Obama, read RBO’s September 1, 2008, The ever-calculating Barack Obama. Alinsky’s bamboozler, okie-doker, flim-flam man and RBO News & Views for October 8, 2008, All in the Alinsky Family.
Also see Gilbert’s other ACORN-related articles (with many more S&L articles linked at each):
* Obama, ACORN/Project Vote And SEIU, December 10, 2008.
* Obama and ACORN: It’s a power thing, September 16, 2008.
ACORN: It’s much more than voter fraud
Returning to Steve Gilbert’s post re ACORN and AIG, in which he links to DiscoverTheNetworks’ ACORN profile, Gilbert writes:
The DTN article goes into much of the recent voter fraud allegations and convictions involving ACORN. As previously noted, voter fraud is part and parcel of the Cloward-Piven strategy of overwhelming the system. But since they are relatively well-known, we have left those out.
More to the point, as we have chronicled endlessly here at S&L, ACORN was hugely instrumental in the long-term campaign to get banks and savings and loans to give mortgages (and other forms of credit) to people who would not otherwise qualify – and who, it now turns out, could seldom afford them.
Like the NWRO, ACORN has regularly used the Alinsky/Coward-Piven tactics of threatening bank employees with violence, if they did not provide mortgages to their ‘constituents.’
But just to show how completely and utterly shameless they are, as we have previously reported, ACORN itself is now behind the protests against the very people who lent the money for these bad mortgages or who tried to insure these toxic loans.
As we were the first to report March 20, executives of AIG are now being harassed by ACORN foot soldiers in their very homes, via ACORN’s front group the so-called Working Families of Connecticut.
March 22, 2009 by Procrustes
Basic RGBRBO has written a number of times the past months about the interconnectedness of ACORN, SEIU and the other unions, and various entities based on the Cloward-Piven Strategy (more below), to which we can now add AIG.
John Batchelor’s excellent post AIG Kulaks has prompted a wealth of response regarding various aspects of the AIG “situation”, including several items posted in today’s RBO News & Views — The Kulaks Revolt Edition.
But there are a lot more astute observations and insights to be shared. So, read the following, mark them for future reference, and — most and best of all — pass them on.
Investigating “control” and “redistribution” of the wealth
1-1-1-pujo1Turning first to John Batchelor’s article that was originally posted on his blog, Mark Maps remarked in the comments:
And so it begins…the war on capital and excellence and achievement. Those who have “too much” must be brought down because they damage the self-esteem of the underachievers and excite the greed of our political clown-class, the hollow men. Where and when will it end…at the bottom, in a vast grey wasteland, from sea to shining sea…with a wimper, not a bang.
Lou Filliger added:
“So it begins” with the Pujo hearings, 1912. So it continues with the AIG hearings, 2009. The socialists are preparing for the celebration of 100 years of virtually uninterrupted rule in this country. The lie that my parents told me when I was a child that this was a free country, has been the hardest lie to unlearn.
The actual name for the “Pujo hearings” is The Money Trust Investigation, which, in their textbook American Government, James Q. Wilson and John J. DiIulio, Jr. identify as the “Concentration of control of money, and consequently of credit.”
In a corporate governance timeline posted May 22, 2002, at MarketWatch, Jon Friedman wrote:
1912 — Congress holds the Pujo hearings, looking into J. Pierpont Morgan and his bank’s stranglehold over American industry through board representation and financing deals.
According to the Wikipedia article on the history of the Federal Reserve:
The hearings continued for a full year and were led by the Subcommittee’s counsel, Democratic lawyer Samuel Untermyer, who later also assisted in preparing the Federal Reserve Act. The “Pujo hearings” convinced much of the populace that America’s money largely rested in the hands of a select few on Wall Street.
1-1-1-aig-testify1Justin Fox wrote March 6 at TIME about some of the dissimilarities in the handling by Congress of the Pujo and AIG cases:
The 20th century saw two great Congressional inquiries into financial misbehavior—the Pujo hearings of 1912-1913 and the Pecora hearings of 1933-1934. The essential characteristic that both shared, other than their names begin with “P,” was that the questioning was done not by blowhard members of Congress but by very smart New York lawyers hired by Congress: Samuel Untermyer in 1912-1913 (Arsene Pujo of Louisiana was the chairman of the subcommittee that held the hearings, but he let Untermyer do the talking) and Ferdinand Pecora in 1933-1934. So far all we’ve gotten from this crisis are some disappointing hearings where elected officials—most of them with little knowledge and no prosecutorial skills—ask the questions. But both the Pujo and Pecora hearings did come several years after the financial collapses they were meant to investigate (the Panic of 1907 in Pujo’s case, in case you were wondering), meaning that we’ve still got lots of time.
Background on the AIG “juggernaut”
1-1-1-aig1Pundita recommends the three-part series of reports in The Washington Post by staff writers Robert O’Harrow Jr. and Brady Dennis. She comments:
The articles, which could be Pulitzer Prize material, ran from December 29-31, 2008. To my knowledge the best publicly-available background on how AIG became a juggernaut. Beautifully written, also. A joy to read.
o The Beautiful Machine
o A Crack in The System.
o Downgrades and Downfall.
The Cloward-Piven Strategy
1-1-1-cloward-pivenAnother commenter at John Batchelor’s blog, bortog, wrote:
Two left-wing Columbia University professors named Cloward and Piven mapped out the techniques for destroying democracy by overburdening government with spending. Barack Obama was groomed from childhood in this school of thought.
Follow the lineage of American socialism from Cloward-Piven, through Saul Alinsky, to Frank Marshall Davis and his protege, Barack Obama.
Kurt Nimmo, in his March 10 Infowars well-linked and informative article, Obama, the Cloward-Piven Strategy, and the New World Order, linked to Brannon Howse’s March 9 Worldview Radio interview with former White House budget analyst and author James Simpson.
Howse introduces his MP3 podcast with Simpson, “Barack Obama is “Destroying Our Economy on Purpose,” thusly (emphasis added):
Description: A pair of radical Columbia University professors by the name of Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven wrote an article in the radical magazine known as The Nation. The article was published on May 2, 1966 and laid out what is now known as the “Cloward-Piven Strategy”. The plan calls for the destruction of capitalism in America by swelling the welfare rolls to the point of collapsing our economy and then implementing socialism by nationalizing many private institutions. Cloward and Piven studied Saul Alinsky just like Hillary Clinton and President Obama. Listen as Brannon and his guest James Simpson explain how Cloward and Piven inspired the creation of ACORN that Obama worked for as a community organizer. This interview must be e-mailed all over the country. Americans must awaken and understand the goal of these radicals and what is to come if they succeed. Time is of the essence. Obama is not over his head as some have claimed; he knows exactly what he is doing. Understand the Cloward-Piven Strategy, the rules of Saul Alinsky and their Cultural Marxist worldview and you will understand that what is occurring is not by mistake.
DiscoverTheNetworks reports:
Inspired by the August 1965 riots in the black district of Watts in Los Angeles (which erupted after police had used batons to subdue a black man suspected of drunk driving), Cloward and Piven published an article titled “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty” in the May 2, 1966 issue of The Nation. Following its publication, The Nation sold an unprecedented 30,000 reprints. Activists were abuzz over the so-called “crisis strategy” or “Cloward-Piven Strategy,” as it came to be called. Many were eager to put it into effect.
In their 1966 article, Cloward and Piven charged that the ruling classes used welfare to weaken the poor; that by providing a social safety net, the rich doused the fires of rebellion. Poor people can advance only when “the rest of society is afraid of them,” Cloward told The New York Times on September 27, 1970. Rather than placating the poor with government hand-outs, wrote Cloward and Piven, activists should work to sabotage and destroy the welfare system; the collapse of the welfare state would ignite a political and financial crisis that would rock the nation; poor people would rise in revolt; only then would “the rest of society” accept their demands.
The key to sparking this rebellion would be to expose the inadequacy of the welfare state. Cloward-Piven’s early promoters cited radical organizer Saul Alinsky as their inspiration. “Make the enemy live up to their (sic) own book of rules,” Alinsky wrote in his 1972 book Rules for Radicals. When pressed to honor every word of every law and statute, every Judaeo-Christian moral tenet, and every implicit promise of the liberal social contract, human agencies inevitably fall short. The system’s failure to “live up” to its rule book can then be used to discredit it altogether, and to replace the capitalist “rule book” with a socialist one. [...]
Their article called for “cadres of aggressive organizers” to use “demonstrations to create a climate of militancy.” Intimidated by threats of black violence, politicians would appeal to the federal government for help. Carefully orchestrated media campaigns, carried out by friendly, leftwing journalists, would float the idea of “a federal program of income redistribution,” in the form of a guaranteed living income for all — working and non-working people alike. Local officials would clutch at this idea like drowning men to a lifeline. They would apply pressure on Washington to implement it. With every major city erupting into chaos, Washington would have to act.
This was an example of what are commonly called Trojan Horse movements — mass movements whose outward purpose seems to be providing material help to the downtrodden, but whose real objective is to draft poor people into service as revolutionary foot soldiers; to mobilize poor people en masse to overwhelm government agencies with a flood of demands beyond the capacity of those agencies to meet. The flood of demands was calculated to break the budget, jam the bureaucratic gears into gridlock, and bring the system crashing down. Fear, turmoil, violence and economic collapse would accompany such a breakdown — providing perfect conditions for fostering radical change. That was the theory.
Robert E. Weir writes in his “Class in America” (screenshot from page 616 in Google book):
1-1-1-piven-21-1-1-piven-1
Here you can listen to Frances Fox Piven interviewed February 6, 2008, by Harold Channer:
“Weight of the Poor”
Both DiscoverTheNetworks and Robert Weir, in his “Class in America”, mention that the title for the Cloward-Piven article includes the phrase “weight of the poor.” It should surprise no one that this comes directly from Leon Trotsky, who complained in Chapter 8 of his 1927 “Platform of the Joint Opposition” (emphasis added):
The League of Communist Youth in the country is more and more losing its proletarian and poor peasant support. Its cultural and economic work in the country has for its main object the development of individual farms. The relative weight of the poor is systematically falling everywhere – in the general composition of the rural branches, in the active membership, in the nucleus composed of party members. Along with the continual diminishing of the influx of young town workers, the League is filling up in the countryside with middle and well-off peasant youth.
As in the town, so also in the country the tendency of the petty-bourgeois elements to get hold of the leadership of the League is growing. The group of clerical workers and “miscellaneous” is playing a more and more considerable role, especially in the rural organizations.
But is this not what has happened and continues to happen with Leftie agitator groups such as Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Project Vote, and all the Socialist/Marxist/Communist organizations with which the Unprez and his supporters are affiliated? Membership in these groups is not comprised of “the poor” — they are professionals and college students. SDS alumni such as Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, Carl Davidson, Mike Klonsky, and an endless list of aging 1960s radicals who either participated in Weather violence, hence going Underground to escape arrest, or continued along the radical activist path, were then and are now anything but “the poor”. White middle-to-upper class radicals don’t qualify.
For more on Ayers-Dohrn, SDS and Weather, see RBO’s Ayers-Dorhn Resource List; for more on the various Socialist/Marxist/Communist groups, see RBO’s The Obama Socialist/Marxist/Communist Reader.
More Cloward-Simpson and AIG
The following Cloward-Simpson Strategy chart is included in Simpson’s Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis, posted September 28, 2008, at American Thinker.
acorn-network
You can also read Simpson’s articles on the Cloward-Piven Strategy posted at FrontPage.com’s ‘American Daughter’ blog:
* Part I: Manufactured Crisis.
* Part II: Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis.
* Part III: Conspiracy of the Lemmings.
Uppity Woman forwarded the link for Steve Gilbert’s March 21 post Cloward-Piven, ACORN And AIG Witch Hunt at Sweetness & Light, which links back to Gilbert’s previoius posts, The Many Tentacles Of ‘Cloward-Piven’ (which includes the DiscoverTheNetworks profile on Cloward-Piven) and How The Left Is Spinning The Bank Crisis, both also posted March 21.
In the latter-named article, Gilbert opened with:
With the Obama ascendency it is all too easy to be consumed with the rush of news of the latest outrage against our republic. Consequently, we seldom have time to step back and reflect on the larger issues of the day.
So we thought we would take the time to post articles that are not necessarily ripped from the headlines of the day, but which address the more fundamental movements and trends behind them.
Gilbert draws our attention to an unlikely coincidence:
Notice how the people who espouse the ‘Cloward-Piven Strategy’ run like a scarlet thread through the organizations that figure so largely in the housing and banking – and voting – scandals.
Note too how President Obama, a confessed Alinsky acolyte, worked for the Cloward-Piven inspired “Project Vote” project. In fact, it is one of his proudest achievements.
For a good background on Barack “Alinsky” Obama, read RBO’s September 1, 2008, The ever-calculating Barack Obama. Alinsky’s bamboozler, okie-doker, flim-flam man and RBO News & Views for October 8, 2008, All in the Alinsky Family.
Also see Gilbert’s other ACORN-related articles (with many more S&L articles linked at each):
* Obama, ACORN/Project Vote And SEIU, December 10, 2008.
* Obama and ACORN: It’s a power thing, September 16, 2008.
ACORN: It’s much more than voter fraud
Returning to Steve Gilbert’s post re ACORN and AIG, in which he links to DiscoverTheNetworks’ ACORN profile, Gilbert writes:
The DTN article goes into much of the recent voter fraud allegations and convictions involving ACORN. As previously noted, voter fraud is part and parcel of the Cloward-Piven strategy of overwhelming the system. But since they are relatively well-known, we have left those out.
More to the point, as we have chronicled endlessly here at S&L, ACORN was hugely instrumental in the long-term campaign to get banks and savings and loans to give mortgages (and other forms of credit) to people who would not otherwise qualify – and who, it now turns out, could seldom afford them.
Like the NWRO, ACORN has regularly used the Alinsky/Coward-Piven tactics of threatening bank employees with violence, if they did not provide mortgages to their ‘constituents.’
But just to show how completely and utterly shameless they are, as we have previously reported, ACORN itself is now behind the protests against the very people who lent the money for these bad mortgages or who tried to insure these toxic loans.
As we were the first to report March 20, executives of AIG are now being harassed by ACORN foot soldiers in their very homes, via ACORN’s front group the so-called Working Families of Connecticut.
The Cloward/Piven Strategy of Economic Recovery
February 07, 2009
The Cloward/Piven Strategy of Economic Recovery
By Nancy Coppock
Using borrowed money for a band-aid bailout of the economy should seem backwards to most people. However, it likely is a planned strategy to promote radical change. Those naively believing that President Obama is simply rewarding his far-left base, and will then move to the political center, must wise up.
The assumption that Obama will need the nation to prosper in order to protect the 2010 mid-term election incorrectly assumes that he esteems free market capitalism. He does not. Rather than win through superior ideas and policies, the Democrat plan for success in the mid-term elections is to win by destroying political opposition.
Obama adheres to the Saul Alinksy Rules for Radicals method of politics, which teaches the dark art of destroying political adversaries. However, that text reveals only one front in the radical left's war against America. The Cloward/Piven Strategy is another method employed by the radical Left to create and manage crisis. This strategy explains Rahm Emanuel's ominous statement, "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste."
The Cloward/Piven Strategy is named after Columbia University sociologists Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. Their goal is to overthrow capitalism by overwhelming the government bureaucracy with entitlement demands. The created crisis provides the impetus to bring about radical political change.
According to Discover the Networks.org:
Rather than placating the poor with government hand-outs, wrote Cloward and Piven, activists should work to sabotage and destroy the welfare system; the collapse of the welfare state would ignite a political and financial crisis that would rock the nation... [Emphasis added.]
Making an already weak economy even worse is the intent of the Cloward/Piven Strategy. It is imperative that we view the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan's spending on items like food stamps, jobless benefits, and health care through this end goal. This strategy explains why the Democrat plan to "stimulate" the economy involves massive deficit spending projects. It includes billions for ACORN and its subgroups such as SHOP and the Neighborhood Stabilization Program. Expanding the S-Chip Program through deficit spending in a supposed effort to "save the children" only makes a faltering economy worse.
If Congress were to allow a robust economy, parents would be able to provide for their children themselves by earning and keeping more of their own money. Democrats, quick to not waste a crisis, would consider that a lost opportunity.
The Cato Institute reports that the plan will harm a faltering economy, intentionally causing increased job losses leading to increased demands for the aforementioned programs. Even the jobs to be created are set apart to render social justice, not economic revival. Robert Reich believes new infrastructure jobs should not go to white construction workers. Meanwhile, workers at Microsoft, IBM, Texas Instruments, and the retail market find themselves experiencing the life of the welfare poor.
If highly educated and trained workers continue to lose jobs and business falters as a whole, where will these jobless workers go? Could this be construed as revolutionary social reorganization that puts the underachiever above the achiever? Where is the future economic strength when jobless professionals collect welfare and unemployment while dreaming of a minimum wage job? For whites, there's not even the hope of a good paying construction job.
Because these programs are financed with deficit spending, the effect of the Cloward/Piven Strategy becomes doubly destructive. Talk about a perfect storm! The Democrat stimulus plan is a mechanism whose goal is the destruction of the traditional American way of life. It is bitter irony that the American taxpayer will actually fund the destruction of his own ability to live according to the values of our Founding Documents. It is not alarmist to identify this situation as a coup d'etat.
As the flow of money from the top of the economy dries up, job losses and mortgage busts will mount exponentially. The Democrat stimulus plan provides for welfare expansion but not for a robust economy that creates high paying jobs. Is this what Obama means when he warns, "It's going to get worse before it gets better?" If we are not bailing out corporate America so they can regain profitability, we must conclude Obama is working toward another end goal. Recognizing these attack methods reveals the only logical response -- an unwavering wall of "No!"
Nancy Coppock publishes The Jackalope's Voice.
The Cloward/Piven Strategy of Economic Recovery
By Nancy Coppock
Using borrowed money for a band-aid bailout of the economy should seem backwards to most people. However, it likely is a planned strategy to promote radical change. Those naively believing that President Obama is simply rewarding his far-left base, and will then move to the political center, must wise up.
The assumption that Obama will need the nation to prosper in order to protect the 2010 mid-term election incorrectly assumes that he esteems free market capitalism. He does not. Rather than win through superior ideas and policies, the Democrat plan for success in the mid-term elections is to win by destroying political opposition.
Obama adheres to the Saul Alinksy Rules for Radicals method of politics, which teaches the dark art of destroying political adversaries. However, that text reveals only one front in the radical left's war against America. The Cloward/Piven Strategy is another method employed by the radical Left to create and manage crisis. This strategy explains Rahm Emanuel's ominous statement, "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste."
The Cloward/Piven Strategy is named after Columbia University sociologists Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. Their goal is to overthrow capitalism by overwhelming the government bureaucracy with entitlement demands. The created crisis provides the impetus to bring about radical political change.
According to Discover the Networks.org:
Rather than placating the poor with government hand-outs, wrote Cloward and Piven, activists should work to sabotage and destroy the welfare system; the collapse of the welfare state would ignite a political and financial crisis that would rock the nation... [Emphasis added.]
Making an already weak economy even worse is the intent of the Cloward/Piven Strategy. It is imperative that we view the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan's spending on items like food stamps, jobless benefits, and health care through this end goal. This strategy explains why the Democrat plan to "stimulate" the economy involves massive deficit spending projects. It includes billions for ACORN and its subgroups such as SHOP and the Neighborhood Stabilization Program. Expanding the S-Chip Program through deficit spending in a supposed effort to "save the children" only makes a faltering economy worse.
If Congress were to allow a robust economy, parents would be able to provide for their children themselves by earning and keeping more of their own money. Democrats, quick to not waste a crisis, would consider that a lost opportunity.
The Cato Institute reports that the plan will harm a faltering economy, intentionally causing increased job losses leading to increased demands for the aforementioned programs. Even the jobs to be created are set apart to render social justice, not economic revival. Robert Reich believes new infrastructure jobs should not go to white construction workers. Meanwhile, workers at Microsoft, IBM, Texas Instruments, and the retail market find themselves experiencing the life of the welfare poor.
If highly educated and trained workers continue to lose jobs and business falters as a whole, where will these jobless workers go? Could this be construed as revolutionary social reorganization that puts the underachiever above the achiever? Where is the future economic strength when jobless professionals collect welfare and unemployment while dreaming of a minimum wage job? For whites, there's not even the hope of a good paying construction job.
Because these programs are financed with deficit spending, the effect of the Cloward/Piven Strategy becomes doubly destructive. Talk about a perfect storm! The Democrat stimulus plan is a mechanism whose goal is the destruction of the traditional American way of life. It is bitter irony that the American taxpayer will actually fund the destruction of his own ability to live according to the values of our Founding Documents. It is not alarmist to identify this situation as a coup d'etat.
As the flow of money from the top of the economy dries up, job losses and mortgage busts will mount exponentially. The Democrat stimulus plan provides for welfare expansion but not for a robust economy that creates high paying jobs. Is this what Obama means when he warns, "It's going to get worse before it gets better?" If we are not bailing out corporate America so they can regain profitability, we must conclude Obama is working toward another end goal. Recognizing these attack methods reveals the only logical response -- an unwavering wall of "No!"
Nancy Coppock publishes The Jackalope's Voice.
The Cloward-Piven Strategy, Part I: Manufactured Crisis
The Cloward-Piven Strategy, Part I: Manufactured Crisis
By Jim Simpson | Sunday, August 31st, 2008 at 2:10 pm
Liberals self-righteously wrap themselves in the mantle of public spirit. They ardently promote policies promising to deliver the poor and oppressed from their latest misery — policies which can only find solution in the halls of government. But no matter what issue one examines, over the last fifty plus years, the liberal prescription has almost always been a failure.
Why is this so? Why does virtually every liberal scheme result in ever-increasing public spending while conditions seem to get continually worse? There are a number of reasons:
1. The programs usually create adverse incentives. This is especially true in so-called “anti-poverty” programs. The beneficiaries find government subsidies a replacement for, rather than a supplement to, gainful employment and eventually become incapable of supporting themselves. This in turn creates a dependent culture with its attendant toxic behaviors which demand still more government “remedies.”
2. The programs create their own industry, complete with scads of “think tanks” and “experts” who survive on government research grants. These are the aptly named “Beltway Bandits.”
3. They create their own bureaucracies, whose managers conspire with interested members of Congress to continually increase program funding, regardless of merit.
4. Members of Congress secure votes and campaign donations by extorting them from beneficiaries of such programs, either through veiled threats — “vote for me or those mean Republicans will wipe out your benefits” — or promises of still more bennies.
In short, all develop a vested interest in the program’s survival. But if the result is always more and more government, of government, by government, and for government, with no solution in sight, then why do liberals always see government as the solution rather than the problem?
Similarly, liberals use government to promote legislation that imposes mandates on the private sector to provide further benefits for selected groups. But the results are even more disastrous. For example, weighing the laws or stacking the courts to favor unions may provide short term security or higher pay for unionized labor, but has ultimately resulted in the collapse of entire domestic industries.
Another example is health care. The Dems are always trying to impose backdoor socialized medicine with incremental legislation. Why do you suppose American healthcare is in such crisis? Answer: the government has already become too deeply involved. For example, many hospitals are closing their doors because they are overwhelmed with the burden of caring for indigent patients, illegal immigrants and vagrants who must, by law, be admitted like everyone else, despite the fact that they cannot pay for services. Read about it here — Destroying Our Health Care. The net result is reduced availability of care for everyone, exactly the opposite of what liberals claim to want.
To further complicate things, liberal jurists and lawyers have created new theories of liability that utilize the legal system as a means to further redistribute income. This too, has resulted in higher costs and prices in affected industries, higher insurance costs, or in some cases, complete elimination of products or services.
Liberals’ endless pursuit of “rights” for different groups also does little but create increasing divisions in our society. Liberal policy pits old against young, men against women, ethnic and racial groups against one another, even American citizens against illegal aliens, all in the name of “equality.” The only result is anger, tension and equal misery for all.
How does any of this improve our lot?
Finally, when companies relocate overseas to avoid the high cost of unionized labor and heavy domestic regulation, liberals sarcastically excoriate them for “outsourcing” America. Yet, when it comes to certain domestic industries, liberals in Congress suddenly become free marketers and choose to buy from overseas contractors rather than domestic suppliers. This happened most recently with a huge military contract being outrageously awarded to the heavily subsidized European consortium, AIRBUS, over America’s own Boeing. Since liberals claim to be so determined to “save the American worker,” what gives?
You have to take a step further back and ask some fundamental questions. Why is the liberal public policy record one of such unmitigated disaster? I mean, even the worst batter hits one occasionally. No one bats zero. No one that is, except liberals.
Prior to the Republican takeover in Congress in 1994, Democrats had over fifty years of virtually unbroken power in Congress with substantial majorities most of the time. With all the time and money in the world — trillions spent — they couldn’t fix a single thing, not one. Today’s liberal has the same complaints, and the same old tired solutions. Can a group of smart people, studying issue after issue for years on end, with virtually unlimited resources at their command, not come up with a single policy that works? Why are they chronically incapable?
Why?
When things go bad all the time, despite the best efforts of all involved, I suggest to you something else is at work — something deeper, more malevolent.
I submit to you that it is not a mistake, the failure is deliberate!
There is a method to the madness, and the method even has a name: the Cloward-Piven Strategy. It was first elucidated in the 1960s by a pair of radical leftist Columbia University professors, Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven:
The strategy of forcing political change through orchestrated crisis…. …the “Cloward-Piven Strategy” seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.
[Part II of this article will explore those organizations created to implement the Cloward-Piven strategy and their ties to the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama.]
The Complete Cloward-Piven Series
The Cloward-Piven Strategy, Part I: Manufactured Crisis
The Cloward-Piven Strategy, Part I — print copy
The Cloward-Piven Strategy, Part II: Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis
The Cloward-Piven Strategy, Part II — print copy
The Cloward-Piven Strategy, Part III: Conspiracy of the Lemmings
The Cloward-Piven Strategy, Part III — print copy
Hate Crimes Legislation — Back Door Censorship
By Jim Simpson | Sunday, August 31st, 2008 at 2:10 pm
Liberals self-righteously wrap themselves in the mantle of public spirit. They ardently promote policies promising to deliver the poor and oppressed from their latest misery — policies which can only find solution in the halls of government. But no matter what issue one examines, over the last fifty plus years, the liberal prescription has almost always been a failure.
Why is this so? Why does virtually every liberal scheme result in ever-increasing public spending while conditions seem to get continually worse? There are a number of reasons:
1. The programs usually create adverse incentives. This is especially true in so-called “anti-poverty” programs. The beneficiaries find government subsidies a replacement for, rather than a supplement to, gainful employment and eventually become incapable of supporting themselves. This in turn creates a dependent culture with its attendant toxic behaviors which demand still more government “remedies.”
2. The programs create their own industry, complete with scads of “think tanks” and “experts” who survive on government research grants. These are the aptly named “Beltway Bandits.”
3. They create their own bureaucracies, whose managers conspire with interested members of Congress to continually increase program funding, regardless of merit.
4. Members of Congress secure votes and campaign donations by extorting them from beneficiaries of such programs, either through veiled threats — “vote for me or those mean Republicans will wipe out your benefits” — or promises of still more bennies.
In short, all develop a vested interest in the program’s survival. But if the result is always more and more government, of government, by government, and for government, with no solution in sight, then why do liberals always see government as the solution rather than the problem?
Similarly, liberals use government to promote legislation that imposes mandates on the private sector to provide further benefits for selected groups. But the results are even more disastrous. For example, weighing the laws or stacking the courts to favor unions may provide short term security or higher pay for unionized labor, but has ultimately resulted in the collapse of entire domestic industries.
Another example is health care. The Dems are always trying to impose backdoor socialized medicine with incremental legislation. Why do you suppose American healthcare is in such crisis? Answer: the government has already become too deeply involved. For example, many hospitals are closing their doors because they are overwhelmed with the burden of caring for indigent patients, illegal immigrants and vagrants who must, by law, be admitted like everyone else, despite the fact that they cannot pay for services. Read about it here — Destroying Our Health Care. The net result is reduced availability of care for everyone, exactly the opposite of what liberals claim to want.
To further complicate things, liberal jurists and lawyers have created new theories of liability that utilize the legal system as a means to further redistribute income. This too, has resulted in higher costs and prices in affected industries, higher insurance costs, or in some cases, complete elimination of products or services.
Liberals’ endless pursuit of “rights” for different groups also does little but create increasing divisions in our society. Liberal policy pits old against young, men against women, ethnic and racial groups against one another, even American citizens against illegal aliens, all in the name of “equality.” The only result is anger, tension and equal misery for all.
How does any of this improve our lot?
Finally, when companies relocate overseas to avoid the high cost of unionized labor and heavy domestic regulation, liberals sarcastically excoriate them for “outsourcing” America. Yet, when it comes to certain domestic industries, liberals in Congress suddenly become free marketers and choose to buy from overseas contractors rather than domestic suppliers. This happened most recently with a huge military contract being outrageously awarded to the heavily subsidized European consortium, AIRBUS, over America’s own Boeing. Since liberals claim to be so determined to “save the American worker,” what gives?
You have to take a step further back and ask some fundamental questions. Why is the liberal public policy record one of such unmitigated disaster? I mean, even the worst batter hits one occasionally. No one bats zero. No one that is, except liberals.
Prior to the Republican takeover in Congress in 1994, Democrats had over fifty years of virtually unbroken power in Congress with substantial majorities most of the time. With all the time and money in the world — trillions spent — they couldn’t fix a single thing, not one. Today’s liberal has the same complaints, and the same old tired solutions. Can a group of smart people, studying issue after issue for years on end, with virtually unlimited resources at their command, not come up with a single policy that works? Why are they chronically incapable?
Why?
When things go bad all the time, despite the best efforts of all involved, I suggest to you something else is at work — something deeper, more malevolent.
I submit to you that it is not a mistake, the failure is deliberate!
There is a method to the madness, and the method even has a name: the Cloward-Piven Strategy. It was first elucidated in the 1960s by a pair of radical leftist Columbia University professors, Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven:
The strategy of forcing political change through orchestrated crisis…. …the “Cloward-Piven Strategy” seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.
[Part II of this article will explore those organizations created to implement the Cloward-Piven strategy and their ties to the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama.]
The Complete Cloward-Piven Series
The Cloward-Piven Strategy, Part I: Manufactured Crisis
The Cloward-Piven Strategy, Part I — print copy
The Cloward-Piven Strategy, Part II: Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis
The Cloward-Piven Strategy, Part II — print copy
The Cloward-Piven Strategy, Part III: Conspiracy of the Lemmings
The Cloward-Piven Strategy, Part III — print copy
Hate Crimes Legislation — Back Door Censorship
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
The Competition Cure
* AUGUST 23, 2009, 10:55 P.M. ET
The Competition Cure
A better idea to make health insurance affordable everywhere.
"Competition" has become a watchword of Team Obama's push for its health-care bill. Specifically, the Administration has defended its public insurance option as a necessary competitive goad to the private health insurance industry.
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius routinely calls for more choice and competition in health care. In his weekly address this past weekend, President Obama raised the issue directly: "The source of a lot of these fears about government-run health care is confusion over what's called the public option. This is one idea among many to provide more competition and choice, especially in the many places around the country where just one insurer thoroughly dominates the marketplace." We take it this refers to a state in which one insurer holds most of the business.
It is no secret that this page is all for competition in the marketplace. If indeed that's the goal, allow us to suggest a path to it that will be a lot easier than erecting the impossible dream of a public option: Let insurance companies sell health-care policies across state lines.
This excellent idea has been before Congress since at least 2005, when Rep. John Shadegg of Arizona proposed it. It came up again recently in an exchange between Chris Wallace of Fox News Sunday and John Rother, executive vice president of AARP.
Mr. Wallace: "If you really want competition why not remove the restriction which now says that if I live in Washington, D.C. I've got to buy a D.C. health plan, and instead create a national market for health insurance, so that if there's a cheaper plan in Pennsylvania, I could buy in Pennsylvania?"
Mr. Rother: "There are states and localities where health care is much less expensive than others, and if we allow people to buy all their insurance from those places, it will raise the rates there. And it's called risk selection. It's a real problem, given the fact that health care costs can vary substantially from one place to another. So I think while the idea sounds appealing, the consequence would be it would make health care more expensive for those people who live in those low-cost areas."
How did Mr. Rother arrive at this conclusion?
His claim assumes that what makes insurance expensive in places like New Jersey—where the annual cost of an individual plan for a 25-year-old male in 2006 was $5,880—is merely the higher cost of medical services in the Garden State. He sounds an alarm in the rest of the country by suggesting that an individual living in, say, Kentucky—where an annual plan for a 25-year-old male cost less than $1,000 in 2006—would be asked to subsidize plan members living in high-priced states.
That's not how interstate insurance would work. Devon Herrick, a senior fellow with the National Center for Policy Analysis who has written extensively on this subject, notes that insurance companies operating nationally would compete nationally. The reason a Kentucky plan written for an individual from New Jersey would save the New Jerseyan money is that New Jersey is highly regulated, with costly mandated benefits and guaranteed access to insurance.
Affordability would improve if consumers could escape states where each policy is loaded with mandates. "If consumers do not want expensive 'Cadillac' health plans that pay for acupuncture, fertility treatments or hairpieces, they could buy from insurers in a state that does not mandate such benefits," Mr. Herrick has written.
A 2008 publication "Consumer Response to a National Marketplace in Individual Insurance," (Parente et al., University of Minnesota) estimated that if individuals in New Jersey could buy health insurance in a national market, 49% more New Jerseyans in the individual and small-group market would have coverage. Competition among states would produce a more rational regulatory environment in all states.
This doesn't mean sick people who have kept up their coverage but are more difficult to insure would be left out. Congressman Shadegg advocates government funding for high-risk pools, noting that their numbers are tiny. The big benefit would come from a market supply of affordable insurance.
Mr. Rother also said "risk selection" is a problem. But the coverage mandates cause that. As more healthy people opt out of health insurance because it is too expensive relative to what they consume, the pool transforms into a group of older, sicker people. Prices go higher still and more healthy people flee. High-mandate states are in what experts call an "adverse selection death spiral."
Interstate competition made the U.S. one of the world's most efficient, consumer driven markets. But health insurance is a glaring exception. When the competition caucus in Team Obama has to look for Plan B, this is it.
The Competition Cure
A better idea to make health insurance affordable everywhere.
"Competition" has become a watchword of Team Obama's push for its health-care bill. Specifically, the Administration has defended its public insurance option as a necessary competitive goad to the private health insurance industry.
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius routinely calls for more choice and competition in health care. In his weekly address this past weekend, President Obama raised the issue directly: "The source of a lot of these fears about government-run health care is confusion over what's called the public option. This is one idea among many to provide more competition and choice, especially in the many places around the country where just one insurer thoroughly dominates the marketplace." We take it this refers to a state in which one insurer holds most of the business.
It is no secret that this page is all for competition in the marketplace. If indeed that's the goal, allow us to suggest a path to it that will be a lot easier than erecting the impossible dream of a public option: Let insurance companies sell health-care policies across state lines.
This excellent idea has been before Congress since at least 2005, when Rep. John Shadegg of Arizona proposed it. It came up again recently in an exchange between Chris Wallace of Fox News Sunday and John Rother, executive vice president of AARP.
Mr. Wallace: "If you really want competition why not remove the restriction which now says that if I live in Washington, D.C. I've got to buy a D.C. health plan, and instead create a national market for health insurance, so that if there's a cheaper plan in Pennsylvania, I could buy in Pennsylvania?"
Mr. Rother: "There are states and localities where health care is much less expensive than others, and if we allow people to buy all their insurance from those places, it will raise the rates there. And it's called risk selection. It's a real problem, given the fact that health care costs can vary substantially from one place to another. So I think while the idea sounds appealing, the consequence would be it would make health care more expensive for those people who live in those low-cost areas."
How did Mr. Rother arrive at this conclusion?
His claim assumes that what makes insurance expensive in places like New Jersey—where the annual cost of an individual plan for a 25-year-old male in 2006 was $5,880—is merely the higher cost of medical services in the Garden State. He sounds an alarm in the rest of the country by suggesting that an individual living in, say, Kentucky—where an annual plan for a 25-year-old male cost less than $1,000 in 2006—would be asked to subsidize plan members living in high-priced states.
That's not how interstate insurance would work. Devon Herrick, a senior fellow with the National Center for Policy Analysis who has written extensively on this subject, notes that insurance companies operating nationally would compete nationally. The reason a Kentucky plan written for an individual from New Jersey would save the New Jerseyan money is that New Jersey is highly regulated, with costly mandated benefits and guaranteed access to insurance.
Affordability would improve if consumers could escape states where each policy is loaded with mandates. "If consumers do not want expensive 'Cadillac' health plans that pay for acupuncture, fertility treatments or hairpieces, they could buy from insurers in a state that does not mandate such benefits," Mr. Herrick has written.
A 2008 publication "Consumer Response to a National Marketplace in Individual Insurance," (Parente et al., University of Minnesota) estimated that if individuals in New Jersey could buy health insurance in a national market, 49% more New Jerseyans in the individual and small-group market would have coverage. Competition among states would produce a more rational regulatory environment in all states.
This doesn't mean sick people who have kept up their coverage but are more difficult to insure would be left out. Congressman Shadegg advocates government funding for high-risk pools, noting that their numbers are tiny. The big benefit would come from a market supply of affordable insurance.
Mr. Rother also said "risk selection" is a problem. But the coverage mandates cause that. As more healthy people opt out of health insurance because it is too expensive relative to what they consume, the pool transforms into a group of older, sicker people. Prices go higher still and more healthy people flee. High-mandate states are in what experts call an "adverse selection death spiral."
Interstate competition made the U.S. one of the world's most efficient, consumer driven markets. But health insurance is a glaring exception. When the competition caucus in Team Obama has to look for Plan B, this is it.
Monday, September 28, 2009
Health Care Flow Chart (new and improved)
http://jec.senate.gov/republicans/public/_files/SFCMarkFlowchart92209.pdf
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
76 Reasons To Have a Gun
So far, Obama's failing miserably
By: Jeremy Lott
September 15, 2009 05:05 AM EST
Jeremy Lott is editor of Capital Research Center’s Labor Watch newsletter and author of “The Warm Bucket Brigade: The Story of the American Vice Presidency.”
When he ran for president, George W. Bush promised to be a modest reformer at home and a humble representative of the United States on the world stage. The Al Qaeda-organized-and-funded terrorist attacks of eight years ago changed all that. During his presidency, Bush created massive new government bureaucracies, sent troops into two wars and threatened more as part of America’s war on terror.
Barack Obama’s initial approach to the office of the presidency has been as grandiose as Bush’s was restrained. It’s not hard to recall that he ran as a transformative candidate, promising sweeping, though somewhat fuzzy, “change” during the campaign.
For the first several months of his presidency, Obama has labored to deliver on that pledge. He pushed a controversial stimulus bill through Congress to help rev up the economy, turned Bush’s reluctant bailout of Chrysler and General Motors into a giant government auto buyout and appointed a record number of “czars” to help regulate bureaucracies in both public and formerly private sectors.
Then, Step 2. Obama is trying to fundamentally alter the American economy by backing sweeping environmental, labor and health care legislation. He wants to change the way Americans consume energy, unionize and see their doctors.
So far, he’s failing miserably. Consider the following:
• Cap-and-trade legislation had to limp over the finish line in the House of Representatives with the help of a few moderate Republicans, who then caught holy unshirted hell from their constituents. Environmental legislation generally has taken a drubbing in public opinion polls when people consider how costly it is.
• The Employee Free Choice Act may be stripped of its “card check” provision in the Senate, which would effectively do away with secret ballots for unionization elections. Even in its watered-down form — which still includes highly objectionable, mandatory, binding so-called gunpoint arbitration and makes no concessions to employers who don’t want to have to prop up teetering union pensions — it might not pass the Senate. And the leadership of the House has refused to touch it until the other chamber has made up its mind.
• On health care, forget the rage set off by private citizen Sarah Palin tweeting about “death panels.” Forget the misleading talk about whether there will be a “public option.” (The ever-evolving plan is one giant public option, folks.) Forget the angry voters who crowded into the town halls during the August recess. Forget that a number of Democratic senators and Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) are still not willing to sign on to a bill. Right now, even after Obama’s address to the joint session of Congress last week, it’s possible Democrats don’t even have the votes in the House — where they currently enjoy a 77-seat majority.
It’s entirely possible — nay, likely — that Obama will lose on all three big issues. He’ll probably take that personally. As he has pushed for the passage of his reforms, his public approval ratings have taken a beating, and voters have started to trust the Republicans more than his party on a host of issues.
The question that most political handicappers are considering right now is not “Will Republicans make gains at the midterm elections?” but “How large will those gains be?”
What all this means is, barring some unforeseeable world event, Obama’s will probably not be a historic presidency. He will have some successes and a lot of failures. His opposition won’t roll over, and his party will refuse to go along with his more costly, and thus risky, schemes. He won’t coast to reelection.
So Obama now has the chance to be the sort of president Bush would have been if the World Trade Center towers had not come down. Here’s hoping he makes the best of it.
By: Jeremy Lott
September 15, 2009 05:05 AM EST
Jeremy Lott is editor of Capital Research Center’s Labor Watch newsletter and author of “The Warm Bucket Brigade: The Story of the American Vice Presidency.”
When he ran for president, George W. Bush promised to be a modest reformer at home and a humble representative of the United States on the world stage. The Al Qaeda-organized-and-funded terrorist attacks of eight years ago changed all that. During his presidency, Bush created massive new government bureaucracies, sent troops into two wars and threatened more as part of America’s war on terror.
Barack Obama’s initial approach to the office of the presidency has been as grandiose as Bush’s was restrained. It’s not hard to recall that he ran as a transformative candidate, promising sweeping, though somewhat fuzzy, “change” during the campaign.
For the first several months of his presidency, Obama has labored to deliver on that pledge. He pushed a controversial stimulus bill through Congress to help rev up the economy, turned Bush’s reluctant bailout of Chrysler and General Motors into a giant government auto buyout and appointed a record number of “czars” to help regulate bureaucracies in both public and formerly private sectors.
Then, Step 2. Obama is trying to fundamentally alter the American economy by backing sweeping environmental, labor and health care legislation. He wants to change the way Americans consume energy, unionize and see their doctors.
So far, he’s failing miserably. Consider the following:
• Cap-and-trade legislation had to limp over the finish line in the House of Representatives with the help of a few moderate Republicans, who then caught holy unshirted hell from their constituents. Environmental legislation generally has taken a drubbing in public opinion polls when people consider how costly it is.
• The Employee Free Choice Act may be stripped of its “card check” provision in the Senate, which would effectively do away with secret ballots for unionization elections. Even in its watered-down form — which still includes highly objectionable, mandatory, binding so-called gunpoint arbitration and makes no concessions to employers who don’t want to have to prop up teetering union pensions — it might not pass the Senate. And the leadership of the House has refused to touch it until the other chamber has made up its mind.
• On health care, forget the rage set off by private citizen Sarah Palin tweeting about “death panels.” Forget the misleading talk about whether there will be a “public option.” (The ever-evolving plan is one giant public option, folks.) Forget the angry voters who crowded into the town halls during the August recess. Forget that a number of Democratic senators and Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) are still not willing to sign on to a bill. Right now, even after Obama’s address to the joint session of Congress last week, it’s possible Democrats don’t even have the votes in the House — where they currently enjoy a 77-seat majority.
It’s entirely possible — nay, likely — that Obama will lose on all three big issues. He’ll probably take that personally. As he has pushed for the passage of his reforms, his public approval ratings have taken a beating, and voters have started to trust the Republicans more than his party on a host of issues.
The question that most political handicappers are considering right now is not “Will Republicans make gains at the midterm elections?” but “How large will those gains be?”
What all this means is, barring some unforeseeable world event, Obama’s will probably not be a historic presidency. He will have some successes and a lot of failures. His opposition won’t roll over, and his party will refuse to go along with his more costly, and thus risky, schemes. He won’t coast to reelection.
So Obama now has the chance to be the sort of president Bush would have been if the World Trade Center towers had not come down. Here’s hoping he makes the best of it.
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