Valerie Jarrett, Washington insider and Chicago Slum Lord

Valerie Jarrett is traveling with Michelle Obama on her pitch to the International Olympic Committee. Val has a vested interest in the Olympics coming to Chicago, see she is a Slum Lord there and stands to make a hefty sum of money, on the backs of the American Taxpayer! Valerie Jarrett is vice chair of Chicago’s Olympics committee. On May 1st Obama granted Val an “Ethical Waver” due to her involvement with the Olympic Committee rather than requiring her to step down.

From http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2008/06/27/grim_proving_ground_for_obamas_housing_policy/

“The squat brick buildings of Grove Parc Plaza, in a dense neighborhood that Barack Obama represented for eight years as a state senator, hold 504 apartments subsidized by the federal government for people who can’t afford to live anywhere else.

But it’s not safe to live here.

About 99 of the units are vacant, many rendered uninhabitable by unfixed problems, such as collapsed roofs and fire damage. Mice scamper through the halls. Battered mailboxes hang open. Sewage backs up into kitchen sinks. In 2006, federal inspectors graded the condition of the complex an 11 on a 100-point scale – a score so bad the buildings now face demolition. Grove Parc has become a symbol for some in Chicago of the broader failures of giving public subsidies to private companies to build and manage affordable housing – an approach strongly backed by Obama as the best replacement for public housing.

Another Habitat-mismanaged property called Lawndale Restoration was so run-down that city officials urged the federal government to take over the complex.

Jarrett is the chief executive of Habitat Co., which managed Grove Parc Plaza from 2001 until this winter and co-managed an even larger subsidized complex in Chicago that was seized by the federal government in 2006, after city inspectors found widespread problems.”

The trip she is on is costing the Taxpayers more than $1,000,000, one way and that is just for Val’s and Michelle’s trip, Barry will be following tomorrow at the same cost. The total will be more than $4,000,000 spent TRYING to goad the IOC to AWARD Chicago the RIGHT to spend American Tax payers money on a boondoggle.

Who will benefit from this?  Chicago, where the city government needs to shut down for “Reduced Service Days” ? The people of Chicago and Illinois who will have to pay higher taxes to fund the venture? Or the People of America who for starters will have shelled out $4,000,000 so far just for the Obama’s trip? If Chicago is awarded the Olympics you can be sure that Washington will pump Billions to Chicago lining the pockets of the “Crook County” insiders.

With the Olympics the winner is on the hook for billions the looser gets to watch on TV for free.

Commander -in-Chief or Campaigner-in-Chief?

What seems important to Americans doesn’t seem to carry to Washington. The safety and equipping of our troops, the Domestic Jihad training and scheming to strike within our boarders. Our unsecured boarders which anyone it seems can cross with impunity. Iran with its nuclear program and missile testing. Health Care reform being shoved through even though the American People have been more than clear that this is not what we want. Now Obama is taking on what seems to him the number one priority, Securing the 2016 Olympics for Chicago. Obama will travel Thursday night to Copenhagen to make a personal appearance before the International Olympic Committee as it prepares to announce the host city for the 2016 Summer Games.

We know where he stands on the Olympics but where does he stand on these?

Domestic terror – While our intelligence community has once again uncovered a plot to kill Americans within the U.S. The Obama Administration is investigating and prosecuting the same community.

Secure boarder- The American People were promise a secure southern boarder, to date a complete fence has not been constructed. Obama canceled plans to extend the border fence along the U.S.-Mexico border beyond the 670 miles already completed or planned. The administration’s turnabout left limited funds for roads, lights and so-called tactical infrastructure – but not a dime to extend the pedestrian fencing and vehicle barriers erected along roughly one-third of the nation’s 1,947 mile border with Mexico.

Iran – The lack of any strong words, let alone any actions minus further talks in the U.N. about possible sanctions, Obama has shown Iran that it can do anything that it wants and nothing will be done. As Iran supplies arms and explosives to the opposition in both Iraq and Afghanistan Obama stands with his hands in his pockets doing nothing as Iran spits in our face.

Health Care Reform – Single payer system, the backbone of this whole attempt to control 1/6^th of our economy.

Supporting the troops – Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s request for more U.S. troops in Afghanistan still stands unanswered, our brave Members of our Armed forces are doing their best to fight the war that Obama claimed was going to be his priority while he was campaigning.

Is this really the number one priority for the Commander-in-Chief of our Armed forces? Clearly our children that have volunteered to protect and serve our country deserve better from someone that wanted so to be their Commander-in-Chief, too bad Mr. Obama does not take his oath of office as serious as our Military does.

HR 3221 that takeover of Student Loans in America

While America has been focusing on HR3200 the House passed HR 3221, Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2009 on September 17th.
From Open Congress.org:
“This bill would end a program that provides government subsidies to student loan companies and use the saving to increase Pell Grants and other scholarship programs. It would also provide funding for renovating and constructing public schools and community colleges and ensuring that such institutions meet environmental and energy standards.”
What will happen now? With their planned takeover of the Health Care in the U.S. there will be a drastic shortage of students willing to become Doctors. The Federal Government will now control who get what loans. If there is a shortage of Medical School students the there might be a shortage of student loans for every other other course of study with the exception of Medical Studies? How will they structure the loans?
From http://republicans.edlabor.house.gov/PRArticle.aspx?NewsID=1198
“H.R. 3221, the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act, fulfills President Obama’s call to abolish the Federal Family Education Loan (FFEL) program and replace it with a system of government-run lending directly from the U.S. Treasury. This job killing government takeover of student lending generates approximately $87 billion in savings and earnings for the government – the bulk of which Democrats plan to spend on an array of new and expanded entitlement programs. However, several recent analyses from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) have cast doubt on Democrats’ claims that the bill would reduce the federal deficit – instead, CBO has uncovered billions in hidden spending.”
Some items have nothing to do with Student Aid included:
* New early learning program to develop and fund state programs – cost, $8 billion;
* Extension of “temporary” funding for Minority Serving Institutions – cost, $2.6 billion;
* New College Access and Completion Fund to improve information sharing and promote student persistence and completion – cost, $3 billion;
* A recreated Perkins loan program that will operate as yet another direct loan model administered by institutions – program size, $6 billion per year;
* New school construction and renovation funding for K-12 and postsecondary facilities – cost, $6.6 billion; and
* New community college initiative that overlaps with existing job training programs administered by the U.S. Department of Labor – cost, $7 billion.
On July 27, 2009, CBO wrote a letter to Senator Judd Gregg (R-NH) showing that when market risk is taken into account, the supposed savings generated by H.R. 3221 would plummet by $33 billion. This was followed by a September 9, 2009 letter from CBO to Rep. John Kline (R-MN) showing Democrats’ plan to expand the Pell Grant program would cost $11.4 billion more than originally estimated. Finally, even the official CBO score of the proposal reveals an extra $13.5 billion in so called discretionary spending that would result from enactment of H.R. 3221. Taken together, these analyses expose a plan that would not reduce the deficit, as Democrats claim, but would actually cost taxpayers close to $50 billion over the next 10 years.
Who does this bill serve? Surly not the taxpayers, maybe you should ask the members of the House that voted for it.

The problem with power and the abuse of power

Abuse of power has been a problem with the Federal Government for some time. There are many problems with the proposed reforms.

Problem one with the proposed “Health Care Reform”, no Constitutional backing. Sure they want to throw the “General Welfare” clause of the Constitution out there but problem one with that is the words of James Madison, the author of our Constitution:

“If Congress can employ money indefinitely to the general welfare,

and are the sole and supreme judges of the general welfare,

they may take the care of religion into their own hands;

they may appoint teachers in every State, county and parish

and pay them out of their public treasury;

they may take into their own hands the education of children,

establishing in like manner schools throughout the Union;

they may assume the provision of the poor;

they may undertake the regulation of all roads other than post-roads;

in short, every thing, from the highest object of state legislation

down to the most minute object of police,

would be thrown under the power of Congress…. Were the power

of Congress to be established in the latitude contended for,

it would subvert the very foundations, and transmute the very nature

of the limited Government established by the people of America.”

This holding true that the Constitution is not a “living Document”.

Problem two is that Health Insurance is not regulated by any interstate commerce by design of, guess who? The Federal Government! Unlike Life, Home and Auto insurance, the Fed has mandated that Health Insurance companies can not write policies outside of their state boundaries. This has created the virtual monopoly that exists today within the industry. If these restrictions were to be removed there would be a decline of rates virtually over night.

Problem three is that our lawmakers have conveniently forgotten that their job is to uphold the Constitution, and pass laws that fall within the guidelines of this document. Ever since McCullough v. Maryland (decided in 1819.) Ruled that”The Federal Government has implied power of the Constitution, under the “elastic clause,” which granted Congress the authority to “make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution” the work of the Federal Government.” ever since then the bastardization of our nation’s laws has become rampant.

Some argue that Article 1 section 8 has some bearing on this issue:

“To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes”

Among the several States means Interstate Commerce, commerce between states. All other commerce is left to the states, the 10^th amendment.

Problem four is that the 10th Amendment has been cast aside in recent times, the last time it was successfully used by states the war or Northern Aggression was unleashed. Since then, it has been virtually forgotten. The 10^th simply states:

“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

If civics were still taught in our schools, our population would know when the Federal Government oversteps the strict boundaries that our Forefathers set for a limited government As it stands we are supposed to believe what Washington has to say because after all, they are from the Government and they are here to help.

SOCIALISTS RETALIATE AGAINST NEW MEDIA

Socialists have begun the Retaliation Against New Media, in the form of S.673. This bill was introduced back in March 24th, 2009 and up until now has had no media discussion.
” S.673 – A bill to allow certain newspapers to be treated as described in section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 and exempt from tax under section 501(a) of such Code.”

It comes in the form of Obama favoring tax breaks (bail-out) for failing newspaper companies if they restructure as 501C-3 non-profit organizations.

With the passage of  Bill S. 673, which has been introduced in the Senate by Sen. Ben Cardin, Democrat from Maryland, this administration and the Congress will have officially created official state run newspapers like those of the late Soviet Union, Pravda and Izvestia.

Obama was responding to questions posed by journalists from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Toledo Blade.

He said that he was concerned that the news would be all blogosphere, “all opinions, with no serious fact-checking, no serious attempts to put stories in context…what you will end up getting is people shouting at each other across the void but not a lot of mutual understanding,” referring to the proliferation of blogs on the internet, like this one.

The passage of this or similar bills remains to be seen, but if it does, we will have state sponsored propaganda mills cranking out the government news of the day.

And it will set an even more dangerous precedent.

What else will the government fund to render it under its tyrannical control?

Try religion. Hitler’s rise to power was helped by state subsidies for certain religions, which many feel helped to obtain silence and quell protests against the Nazi Final Solution. Before you react to say that this was the case but during the war, please note that subsidies to churches in Germany remain a practice to this day.

“In the federal state of Berlin, which is governed by a Social Democratic (SPD) and Democratic Socialist (PDS) coalition, 90 percent of the costs of Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish schools are financed by the state—i.e., by taxpayers—if these religious schools comply with certain general state regulations.” (source: IP Global -Religion and Politics in the U.S. and Germany….http://www.ip-global.org/archiv/volumes/2005/spring2005/religion-an…)

What does that say about cultural trends in Europe?

Where would our country’s moral compass be at that point?

You tell me.

Obama Underwrites Offshore Drilling Too bad it’s not in U.S. waters.

From WSJ.com:

You read that headline correctly. Unfortunately, the Obama Administration is financing oil exploration off Brazil.

The U.S. is going to lend billions of dollars to Brazil’s state-owned oil company, Petrobras, to finance exploration of the huge offshore discovery in Brazil’s Tupi oil field in the Santos Basin near Rio de Janeiro. Brazil’s planning minister confirmed that White House National Security Adviser James Jones met this month with Brazilian officials to talk about the loan.

The U.S. Export-Import Bank tells us it has issued a “preliminary commitment” letter to Petrobras in the amount of $2 billion and has discussed with Brazil the possibility of increasing that amount. Ex-Im Bank says it has not decided whether the money will come in the form of a direct loan or loan guarantees. Either way, this corporate foreign aid may strike some readers as odd, given that the U.S. Treasury seems desperate for cash and Petrobras is one of the largest corporations in the Americas.

But look on the bright side. If President Obama has embraced offshore drilling in Brazil, why not in the old U.S.A.? The land of the sorta free and the home of the heavily indebted has enormous offshore oil deposits, and last year ahead of the November elections, with gasoline at $4 a gallon, Congress let a ban on offshore drilling expire.

The Bush Administration’s five-year plan (2007-2012) to open the outer continental shelf to oil exploration included new lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico. But in 2007 environmentalists went to court to block drilling in Alaska and in April a federal court ruled in their favor. In May, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said his department was unsure whether that ruling applied only to Alaska or all offshore drilling. So it asked an appeals court for clarification. Late last month the court said the earlier decision applied only to Alaska, opening the way for the sale of leases in the Gulf. Mr. Salazar now says the sales will go forward on August 19.

This is progress, however slow. But it still doesn’t allow the U.S. to explore in Alaska or along the East and West Coasts, which could be our equivalent of the Tupi oil fields, which are set to make Brazil a leading oil exporter. Americans are right to wonder why Mr. Obama is underwriting in Brazil what he won’t allow at home.

Obama backs down to Russia, gives in on Missile Defense Shield

The cold war ended with a muffled whimper, the Berlin wall had fallen, the Soviet Union collapsed and America triumphed.  Russia was a shell of its former self.  In recent years Russia has emerged as a force to be reckoned with, exporting arms to Iran, North Korea and everyone else that has the cash, Moscow is the one stop shopping for third world countries.

This week the U.S. has declared that it will not follow through on the promise made to our Eastern European allies to build and maintain a Missile Defense shield system in Poland and The Czech Republic. This shield was needed because of the threat that Russia made to these countries. In a few words, Russia has won the arms race thanks to the Obama administration’s view on the  Missile Shield.

Poland has been wary for some time of Obama and his commitment to the promise made by the Bush Administration.

In March of this year it was revealed that President Obama “secretly” offered Moscow a grand bargain whereby it would sacrifice missile defense sites in Poland and the Czech Republic in exchange for Moscow’s help discouraging Iran’s nuclear program. Then in his July summit with Moscow, Obama reinforced his message that missile defense remains a bargaining chip that can exchanged for his college dream of a nuclear free world.

On November 8th 2008 the BBC reported:

US President-elect Barack Obama has not given a commitment to go ahead with plans to build part of a US missile defence system in Poland, an aide says.

He was speaking after Polish President Lech Kaczynski’s office said a pledge had been made during a phone conversation between the two men.

But Mr Obama’s foreign policy adviser, Denis McDonough, denied this.

Russia opposes the US scheme and has announced plans to deploy missiles on Poland’s border as a counter-measure.

On Friday, EU leaders said the decision would not contribute to creating a climate of confidence or to the improvement of security.

‘No commitment’

In a statement published on his website on Saturday, Poland’s president said Mr Obama had “emphasised the importance of the strategic partnership of Poland and the United States and expressed hope in the continuation of political and military co-operation between our countries.”

“He also said that the missile defence project would continue,” the statement added.

When asked about the declaration, McDonough said that the US president-elect had had “a good conversation” with Mr Kaczynski about the American-Polish alliance and discussed missile defence, but “made no commitment on it”.

“His position is as it was throughout the campaign, that he supports deploying a missile defence system when the technology is proved to be workable,” Mr McDonough told the Associated Press.

In the past, Mr Obama has said he wants to review the plans for a missile defence system in central Europe to ensure it would be effective and not target Russia.

But the BBC’s Adam Easton in Warsaw says the Russian government believes the plan to locate 10 interceptor missiles in northern Poland and a tracking radar in the Czech Republic will do exactly that.

In his first state of the nation address on Wednesday, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev said Moscow would neutralise the system by deploying short-range missiles in its western enclave of Kaliningrad on Poland’s border.

The US military insists the shield is incapable of destroying Russian rockets and is designed solely to guard against missile attack by so-called “rogue states”, such as Iran.

Obama rips U.S. Constitution Faults Supreme Court for not mandating ‘redistribution of wealth’

The oath to be taken by the president on first entering office is specified in Article II, Section 1, of the Constitution:
I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.

From: http://www.wnd.com/index.php?pageId=79225
Seven years before Barack Obama’s “spread the wealth” comment to Joe the Plumber became a GOP campaign theme, the Democratic presidential candidate said in a radio interview the U.S. has suffered from a fundamentally flawed Constitution that does not mandate or allow for redistribution of wealth.
In a newly unearthed tape, Obama is heard telling Chicago’s public station WBEZ-FM in 2001 that “redistributive change” is needed, pointing to what he regarded as a failure of the U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren in its rulings on civil rights issues in the 1960′s.
The Warren court, he said, failed to “break free from the essential constraints” in the U.S. Constitution and launch a major redistribution of wealth. But Obama, then an Illinois state lawmaker, said the legislative branch of government, rather than the courts, probably was the ideal avenue for accomplishing that goal.
In the 2001 interview, Obama said:
If you look at the victories and failures of the civil rights movement and its litigation strategy in the court, I think where it succeeded was to invest formal rights in previously dispossessed people, so that now I would have the right to vote. I would now be able to sit at the lunch counter and order and as long as I could pay for it I’d be OK
But, the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and of more basic issues such as political and economic justice in society. To that extent, as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution, at least as it’s been interpreted, and the Warren Court interpreted in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. Says what the states can’t do to you. Says what the federal government can’t do to you, but doesn’t say what the federal government or state government must do on your behalf.
And that hasn’t shifted and one of the, I think, tragedies of the civil rights movement was because the civil rights movement became so court-focused I think there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalition of powers through which you bring about redistributive change. In some ways we still suffer from that.
In his top-rated national radio show today, Rush Limbaugh reacted to the tape.
The Constitution, he said, “most certainly does spell out things it must do on your behalf. He understands it. He just doesn’t like it.”
“He’s talking about giving things to people,” Limbaugh said. “This is perverted. Some people call this radical. I call it perverted.
“To me, ladies and gentlemen, the Constitution is a gift from God. It’s not a disappointment; it’s a blessing,” he said.
Limbaugh cited unrepentant terrorist William Ayers, with whom Obama has had a relationship for many years, as well as Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the former pastor under whose teaching Obama attended church for two decades. Ayers has stated his Weather Underground didn’t accomplish enough in the bombings on the U.S. Capitol and other locations, and Wright has called on God to d*** America.
“I’m beginning to wonder just who taught whom,” Limbaugh said. “How much did Obama teach Ayers, Jeremiah Wright. Obama didn’t have to hear what Jeremiah Wright was saying, Obama may have half written those sermons.”
The change sought by Obama, however, simply couldn’t be accomplished through court action, the Democrat said in the 2001 interview.
“The court’s not very good at it,” he said. “I’m not optimistic about bringing about major redistributive change through the courts. You know, the institution just isn’t structured that way.”
“You start getting into all sorts of separation of powers issues, the court … engaging in a process that essentially is administrative,” he said.
A commentator on the website American Thinker said Obama “wishes to scrap the limits placed on government powers because they get in the way of his redistributive schemes.”
“What powers are we talking about? Private property rights for one. Since property is distributed ‘unequally’ in Obama’s world, policies must be shaped and laws passed to deal with that situation.”
GOP presidential candidate John McCain’s campaign stated the tape proves Obama is too liberal for the White House.
“Now we know that the slogans ‘change you can believe in’ and ‘change we need’ are code words for Barack Obama’s ultimate goal: ‘redistributive change,’” said McCain-Palin senior policy adviser Doug Holtz-Eakin.
But the Obama campaign called the statements just another distraction.
“In this interview back in 2001, Obama was talking about the civil rights movement – and the kind of work that has to be done on the ground to make sure that everyone can live out the promise of equality. Make no mistake, this has nothing to do with Obama’s economic plan or his plan to give the middle class a tax cut. It’s just another distraction from an increasingly desperate McCain campaign,” spokesman Bill Burton said.
However, reaction to Obama’s comments reached around the globe. In the Telegraph newspaper of London, Toby Harnden said the 2001 remarks are consistent with Obama’s recent statement to the now iconic Joe the Plumber in Ohio, that “when you spread the wealth around it’s a good thing for everybody.”
“Although his remarks were heavily analytical and academic,” Harndon said of the 2001 interview, Obama “spoke warmly of the notion of redistributing wealth, suggesting that there were other vehicles that the courts to achieve it.”
Limbaugh commented, “We know Joe (the Plumber) got Obama to reveal himself.”
But what would be next?
“Would he quote Marx? Would he demand change in the spirit of the Soviet Union? Would he ask us to have Constitution-burning parties?” Limbaugh said.
Limbaugh contended, however, that the “redistribution” was just a distraction.
“It’s part of a process where the government confiscates private property and uses it to secure their own power. It’s not about fairness,” Limbaugh said. “They buy votes with the money they confiscate.”
He continued, “Redistribution is the least frightening part of socialism. What comes after and before is what shocks like a Taser.”
The weblog Right Pundits.com said, “In other words, he sees our money as belonging to the government. He wants to take our money and he will decide how to spend it.”

An Un-Presidential comment from Obama

During what sounds like informal banter before an interview between CNBC’s John Harwood and Obama on Monday, Obama is asked whether his daughters were annoyed by Kanye West‘s hijacking of Swift’s acceptance statement. ABC has said some of its employees had overheard the conversation and didn’t realize it was considered off the record. Although they are competitors, CNBC and ABC share a fiber optic line to save money, and this enabled some ABC employees to listen in on the interview as it was being taped for later use.

“I thought that was really inappropriate,” Obama says. “What are you butting in (for)? … The young lady seems like a perfectly nice person. She’s getting her award. What’s he doing up there?”

A questioner chimes in, “Why would he do it?”

“He’s a jackass,” Obama replies, which is met with laughter from several people.

The president seems to quickly realize he may have gone too far, and jovially appeals to those assembled that the remark be kept private. “Come on guys,” he says. “Cut the president some slack. I’ve got a lot of other stuff on my plate.”

Terry Moran, a former White House correspondent, logged on to Twitter and typed: “Pres. Obama just called Kanye West a ‘jackass’ for his outburst at VMAs when Taylor Swift won. Now THAT’S presidential.”

ABC News quickly says it was wrong for its employees to tweet that Obama had called West a “jackass” for the rapper’s treatment of country singer Taylor Swift. It even went further, when ABC News found out about it, they had the tweets deleted after about an hour.

How very nice that they tried to scrub what was said by Obama, if this were a comment from another party this would have been blasted for all to hear,  as was George W. Bush 2000 remark about a reporter from The New York Times, with no attempt to cover up. Some advice for Obama, if you are sitting in front of an open mic, there is no expectation of privacy, especially if you are a sitting President.

CLOWARD-PIVEN STRATEGY (CPS)

• Strategy for forcing political change through orchestrated crisis

First proposed in 1966 and named after Columbia University sociologists Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, 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.

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.

The authors noted that the number of Americans subsisting on welfare — about 8 million, at the time — probably represented less than half the number who were technically eligible for full benefits. They proposed a “massive drive to recruit the poor onto the welfare rolls.”  Cloward and Piven calculated that persuading even a fraction of potential welfare recipients to demand their entitlements would bankrupt the system. The result, they predicted, would be “a profound financial and political crisis” that would unleash “powerful forces … for major economic reform at the national level.”

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.

Cloward and Piven recruited a militant black organizer named George Wiley to lead their new movement. In the summer of 1967, Wiley founded the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO). His tactics closely followed the recommendations set out in Cloward and Piven’s article. His followers invaded welfare offices across the United States — often violently — bullying social workers and loudly demanding every penny to which the law “entitled” them. By 1969, NWRO claimed a dues-paying membership of 22,500 families, with 523 chapters across the nation.

Regarding Wiley’s tactics, The New York Times commented on September 27, 1970, “There have been sit-ins in legislative chambers, including a United States Senate committee hearing, mass demonstrations of several thousand welfare recipients, school boycotts, picket lines, mounted police, tear gas, arrests – and, on occasion, rock-throwing, smashed glass doors, overturned desks, scattered papers and ripped-out phones.”These methods proved effective. “The flooding succeeded beyond Wiley’s wildest dreams,” writes Sol Stern in the City Journal.  ”From 1965 to 1974, the number of single-parent households on welfare soared from 4.3 million to 10.8 million, despite mostly flush economic times. By the early 1970s, one person was on the welfare rolls in New York City for every two working in the city’s private economy.”As a direct result of its massive welfare spending, New York City was forced to declare bankruptcy in 1975. The entire state of New York nearly went down with it. The Cloward-Piven strategy had proved its effectiveness.

The Cloward-Piven strategy depended on surprise. Once society recovered from the initial shock, the backlash began. New York’s welfare crisis horrified America, giving rise to a reform movement which culminated in “the end of welfare as we know it” — the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which imposed time limits on federal welfare, along with strict eligibility and work requirements. Both Cloward and Piven attended the White House signing of the bill as guests of President Clinton.

Most Americans to this day have never heard of Cloward and Piven. But New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani attempted to expose them in the late 1990s. As his drive for welfare reform gained momentum, Giuliani accused the militant scholars by name, citing their 1966 manifesto as evidence that they had engaged in deliberate economic sabotage. “This wasn’t an accident,” Giuliani charged in a 1997 speech. “It wasn’t an atmospheric thing, it wasn’t supernatural. This is the result of policies and programs designed to have the maximum number of people get on welfare.”

Cloward and Piven never again revealed their intentions as candidly as they had in their 1966 article. Even so, their activism in subsequent years continued to rely on the tactic of overloading the system. When the public caught on to their welfare scheme, Cloward and Piven simply moved on, applying pressure to other sectors of the bureaucracy, wherever they detected weakness.

In 1982, partisans of the Cloward-Piven strategy founded a new “voting rights movement,” which purported to take up the unfinished work of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Like ACORN, the organization that spear-headed this campaign, the new “voting rights” movement was led by veterans of George Wiley’s welfare rights crusade. Its flagship organizations were Project Vote and Human SERVE, both founded in 1982. Project Vote is an ACORN front group, launched by former NWRO organizer and ACORN co-founder Zach Polett. Human SERVE was founded by Richard A. Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, along with a former NWRO organizer named Hulbert James.

All three of these organizations — ACORN, Project Vote and Human SERVE — set to work lobbying energetically for the so-called Motor-Voter law, which Bill Clinton ultimately signed in 1993. The Motor-Voter bill is largely responsible for swamping the voter rolls with “dead  wood” — invalid registrations signed in the name of deceased, ineligible or non-existent people -- thus opening the door to the unprecedented  levels of voter fraud and “voter disenfranchisement” claims that followed in subsequent elections.

The new “voting rights” coalition combines mass voter registration drives -- typically featuring high levels of fraud -- with systematic intimidation of election officials in the form of frivolous lawsuits, unfounded charges of “racism” and “disenfranchisement,” and “direct action” (street protests, violent or otherwise). Just as they swamped America’s welfare offices in the 1960s, Cloward-Piven devotees now seek to overwhelm the nation’s understaffed and poorly policed electoral system. Their tactics set the stage for the Florida recount crisis of 2000, and have introduced a level of fear, tension and foreboding to U.S. elections heretofore encountered mainly in Third World countries. 

Both the Living Wage and Voting Rights movements depend heavily on financial support from George Soros‘s Open Society Institute and his “Shadow Party,” through whose support the Cloward-Piven strategy continues to provide a blueprint for some of the Left’s most ambitious campaigns.

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