The War on Capitalism
By Johnny Roosh
A great many Americans are poised to vote against the status quo without regard for whom or what they will get in its stead.
Change? Hope?
Unquantifiable values by design. The deliberate work of a candidate and a campaign to sweep the electorate off its feet with empty promises of a better time and place.
But what of Obama’s Agenda? What designs does Obama have for the Presidency if he wins? That should be the question voters and the media should have asked by now – and haven’t.
When what little detail Barack Obama has selectively, calculatedly seen fit to share with us, coupled with his tactical “present” votes is put in the context of the nature of his associations…The Socialist Party, Terrorist William Ayers, “God Damn America” Reverend Wright, 2007’s Senator Joe Biden (2007’s Third Most Liberal Senator; Guess who was first), The Corrupt Barney Frank,The Convict Tony Rezko, Demolition Expert and Campaign Adviser Frank Raines…it is clear.
Barack Obama is declaring a War on Capitalism. He wants to redistribute wealth while at the same time punishing those who create it. A shocking level of ignorance of basic economics – heck, even mathematics.
Look at just a few of the things he and congressional Democrats have in mind: Higher taxes on successful entrepreneurs (anyone earning over $250,000), higher taxes on capital gains, higher taxes on dividends, a possible raid on Americans’ 401(k)s, a takeover of America’s private health care industry, strict new limits on what CEOs can make, and the reimposition of the death tax.
Add it up, and Obama will usher in a new era in America — one where capital, the engine of our economic growth and success, is punished severely through the tax code. If Democrats win a filibuster-proof majority in Congress, it’ll be the only form of capital punishment their party will support.
And this is just what we know so far.
From a Chicago Public Radio Interview of Barack Obama in 2001 on the radical Warren Court; a set of ideals and leanings that Barack Obama would never express now, in the throes of a Presidential campaign, but nonetheless reveal the radical leanings of a man America has yet to truly come to know:
…the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and, uh, sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society. And, uh, to that extent as radical as people try to characterize the Warren Court, uh, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed, uh, uh, by the founding fathers in the Constitution, at least as its been interpreted, and the Warren Court interpreted it in the same way that generally the Constitution is a charter if negative liberties-says what the state can’t do to you, says what the federal government can’t do to you, but doesn’t say what the federal government, the state government must do on your behalf. Uh, and that hasn’t shifted. And one of the, uh, I think, tragedies of the was um, because the civil rights movement became so court focused, uh, I think there was a tendency to lose track the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change [emphasis mine], and uh, in some ways we still suffer from that.
The Stock Market is already factoring it in, but if Obama becomes President, Americans may be in for a surprise. Democrats will be donning “Not My President” bumper stickers, as the true ambitions of an extreme liberal unfold.
Redistribution of Wealth is simply a seemingly innocuous way of saying “raise taxes” and “spend more.” It’s like siphoning the gas out of a car, getting in and turning the key, and Change/Hope-ing it will still take him somewhere.
The effect on our economy could be devastating as legions of economists have already attested. As is it stands, our economy may already need several years to dig out of the challenges we already face, without a liberal super majority making it worse.
Higher taxes lower returns on capital. This means everything — wages, stock prices, real estate — will have to decline further as Obama’s tax hikes take hold. That means fewer jobs.
This reverses what has always been America’s recipe for success: an economy built on low taxes, few regulations, free trade and, in general, letting markets decide winners and losers.
Obama says he’s merely “spreading the wealth” — taking money from those who’ve earned it and giving it to those who haven’t. But we already “spread the wealth.” According to economists Gerald Prante and Andrew Chamberlain, the top 40% of households redistribute $1 trillion each year through the tax code to the bottom 60%. And yes, that includes the middle class.
By the way, the top 5% of earners — those squarely in Obama’s tax-hike cross hairs — already pay 60% of all taxes. Obama’s changes would skew that further.
Worse, many of Obama’s “get the rich” tax hikes are really targeted at successful small businesses that create nearly 90% of all U.S. jobs. Among tax filers with adjusted gross incomes of $200,000 or more, some 67% report small-business income.
This is radical stuff. These are catastrophic positions and beliefs that would otherwise be intolerable to Americans, but that are being advanced part and parcel via the popularity of a candidate, The One, for one simple fact:
He’ s not George Bush.
October 27th, 2008 at 10:25 am
All part of the Cloward-Piven plan to bankrupt America and force socialism.
I conveniently put it at http://cloward-piven.com/
The Cloward-Piven Strategy to implement socialist revolution
http://www.canadaka.net/forums/us-politics-f18/the-cloward-piven-strategy-to-implement-socialist-revolution-t8516.html
Source: http://www.discoverthenetwork.com/group … grpid=6967
Source: http://www.discoverthenetwork.com/group … grpid=6967
Quote:
Cloward-Piven is a strategy for forcing political change through orchestrated crisis.
The strategy was first proposed in 1966 by Columbia University political scientists Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven as a plan to bankrupt the welfare system and produce radical change. Sometimes known as the “crisis strategy” or the the “flood-the-rolls, bankrupt-the-cities strategy,” the Cloward-Piven approach called for swamping the welfare rolls with new applicants – more than the system could bear. It was hoped that the resulting economic collapse would lead to political turmoil and ultimately socialism.
The National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), founded by African-American militant George Alvin Wiley, put the Cloward-Piven strategy to work in the streets. Its activities led directly to the welfare crisis that bankrupted New York City in 1975.
Veterans of NWRO went on to found the Living Wage Movement and the Voting Rights Movement, both of which rely on the Cloward-Piven strategy and both of which are spear-headed by the radical cult ACORN.
Both the Living Wage and Voting Rights movements depend heavily on financial support from George Soros’s Open Society Institute.
On August 11, 1965, the black district of Watts in Los Angeles exploded into violence, after police used batons to subdue a man suspected of drunk driving. Riots raged for six days, spilling over into other parts of the city, and leaving 34 dead. Two Columbia University sociologists, Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven were inspired by the riots to develop a new strategy for social change. In November 1965 – barely three months after the fires of Watts had subsided – Cloward and Piven began privately circulating copies of an article they had written called “Mobilizing the Poor: How it Could Be Done.” Six months later (on May 2, 1966), it was published in The Nation, under the title, “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty.”
The article electrified the Left. Following its May 2, 1966 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.
Richard A. Cloward was then a professor of social work at Columbia University. He died in 2001. His co-author Frances Fox Piven was a research associate at Columbia’s School of Social Work. She now holds a Distinguished Professorship of Political Science and Sociology at the City University of New York.
In their 1966 article, Cloward and Piven charged that the ruling classes used welfare to weaken the poor. By providing a social safety net, the rich doused the fires of rebellion. Cloward and Piven wanted to fan those flames. 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, 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. So wrote Cloward and Piven in 1966.
The key to sparking this rebellion would be to expose the inadequacy of the welfare state. This Cloward and Piven proposed to do, in classic Alinsky fashion, by forcing welfare bureaucrats to live up to their own book of rules.
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 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 “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.
The Cloward-Piven strategy never achieved its goal of system breakdown and a Marxist utopia. But it provided a blueprint for some of the Left’s most destructive campaigns of the next three decades. It will likely haunt America for years to come since George Soros’ Shadow Party has now adopted the strategy, honing it into a far more efficient weapon than any of its Sixties-era promoters could have foreseen.
Cloward and Piven recruited a militant black organizer named George Wiley to lead their new movement. For more information on Wiley and his welfare rights movement. In the summer of 1967, Wiley founded the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), with headquarters in Washington, DC. Wiley’s tactics closely followed the recommendations set out in Cloward and Piven’s article. His followers invaded welfare offices across the nation – 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 Manhattan Institute’s 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 reckless welfare spending, New York City – the financial capital of the world – was forced to declare bankruptcy in 1975. The entire state of New York nearly went down with it. Leftist agitators swooned in triumph. The Cloward-Piven strategy had proved its effectiveness.
The Backlash
The Cloward-Piven strategy depended on surprise. Once society recovered from the initial shock, the backlash began. New York’s welfare crisis horrified the nation, 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 Mayor Rudolph Giuliani attempted to expose them in the late 1990’s. As his drive for welfare reform heated up, 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. They learned to cover their tracks. 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.
The Cloward-Piven strategy – first proposed in 1966 – 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. Application of this strategy contributed greatly to the turmoil of the late Sixties. Cloward-Piven failed to usher in socialism, but it succeeded in generating an economic crisis and in escalating the level of political violence in America – two cherished goals of hard-Left strategists.
Radical organizers today continue tinkering with variations on the Cloward-Piven theme, in the perennial hope of reproducing ’60s-style chaos. The thuggish behavior of leftwing unions such as SEIU and of certain elements of George Soros’ Shadow Party can be traced, in a direct line of descent, from the early practitioners of Cloward-Piven.
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 1989 book Rules for Radicals. When pressed to honor every jot and tittle 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.
In its earliest form, the Cloward-Piven strategy applied Alinsky’s principle to the specific area of welfare entitlements. It counseled activists to create what might be called Trojan Horse movements – mass movements whose outward purpose seemed to be providing material help to the downtrodden, but whose real purpose was to draft poor people into service as revolutionary foot soldiers.
The specific function of these Trojan Horse movements was 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, at least, was the theory behind the Cloward-Piven strategy.
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 widely blamed today 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, bogus charges of “racism” and “disenfranchisement” and “direct action” (street protests, violent or otherwise). Just as they swamped America’s welfare offices in the 1960s, the Cloward-Piven team now seeks to overwhelm the nation’s understaffed and poorly policed electoral system. Their antics 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. For more information on the Voting Rights Movement, see the entry for “Project Vote.”
Both the Living Wage and Voting Rights movements depend heavily on financial support from George Soros’s Open Society Institute. It is largely thanks to money from Soros that the Cloward-Piven strategy continues even now to eat away at America’s political and economic infrastructure.
October 27th, 2008 at 10:28 am
If last posting with text of Cloward-Piven plan didn’t take here is link to site I made on it. http://cloward-piven.com/
October 27th, 2008 at 10:29 am
So if Big Media reported the truth about the Messiah, would the election be even close right now?
Wait until Barry gets 3 or so SCUS seats , or just as bad, a few dozen other federal judges in place. Good bye freedoms.
Say, did you see the Obama rally in Colorado? Some Obama supporters made a giant guillitine, and had the heads of Bush and other Republicans in boxes. Guess that isn’t like a single lady yelling “arab” though.
October 27th, 2008 at 11:50 am
We’ll know that Obama is finished politically if he talks about taxing wealth and not income. You can be quite wealthy and have very little income. Most of his big supporters are extremely wealthy but with low incomes: Sergey Brin has an income of $1/year from his company, yet over $18 billion in wealth that he pulls out periodically to buy things like fighter jets.
October 27th, 2008 at 12:50 pm
Glad to see you kooks are working on Plan B, now that the possibility of electing McCain has obviously slipped away. So it’s going to be blame the media, blame the American public for being too stupid to vote in what you think is their own interest, pray to Jesus H. Christ your personal Lord and Savior (TM) that President Obama and America fail miserably. And beginning Nov. 5, you’ll be going on about how McCain lost cause he wasn’t conservativey enough.
Democrats had to make do with The West Wing during the Bush presidency. I’m guessing you guys will be watching a lot of those History Channel documentaries on Hitler.
October 27th, 2008 at 3:41 pm
angryclown said:
“pray to Jesus H. Christ your personal Lord and Savior ™ that President Obama and America fail miserably”
Oh no! We would “Hope” that things would work out differently on this, the Nth time that socialist policies have been enacted. We just would not “Expect” them to. That would define “Insanity”.
October 27th, 2008 at 4:39 pm
You are dangerously unbalanced, soliah.
October 27th, 2008 at 5:29 pm
Hey AC-
I haven’t heard such cawing since the election of Jimmy Carter.
October 27th, 2008 at 6:34 pm
And you are dangerously uninformed Angry Fool.
Hitler was a leftist, but don’t let facts stand in your way.
Oh & Subverting the Constitution through the courts, legislature or “Community Organizing” is blatantly UN-AMERICAN!
October 27th, 2008 at 6:58 pm
West Wing…
Leftist policies always work great in fictional shows, don’t they clown? Problem is, delusional people such as your self eventually have accept reality.
Reality is they fail miserably.
October 27th, 2008 at 8:21 pm
What is Obama’s agenda? What policies does he plan to implement if he wins the Presidency? Why is it that no one, but mainly the left-wing socialist illuminatis, asked these questions? What are they trying to hide?
October 27th, 2008 at 11:10 pm
No need to wait until the 5th, AC.
“McCain lost because he wasn’t conservative enough.”
There.
October 28th, 2008 at 8:41 am
Mr. Shi(r)t brayed: “Hitler was a leftist, but don’t let facts stand in your way.”
Fascintating, Mr. Shi(r)t. Franco and Mussolini too? I guess all those American leftists fought for the wrong side in the Spanish Civil War. And pushed for entry into WWII in contrast to conservative isolationists like Taft.
Please go read a book that isn’t published by Regnery Publishing, then come back and tell us what you learned, m’kay?
October 28th, 2008 at 3:06 pm
Yes, Franco & Mussolini too. Your bringing the Spanish Civil War into this as proof is a laughable non-sequitur, but hey, who would expect more from you.
Mussolini was a Marxist who decided Communism did not go far enough.
Fascism, communism, & socialism vary only slightly form each other. All three rely on central economic planning & production. All three put the state above the individual, all three require the rights of the individual to become insignificant for the benefit of the community, society & the state. There is little difference between the three.
NONE of them have anything in common with free market classical liberalism, which places individual freedom, & Private property rights at the center of it’s philosophy. Free market classical liberalism actively seeks to limit the state’s powers, & is therefore the exact polar opposite of Fascism, socialism & communism.
Your public high school level of education & logic has failed you yet again.
And AC, don’t pretend you can read.
October 28th, 2008 at 10:34 pm
Why are my posts not going through?
Is it because I owe JRoosh $1,000,000 Z?
October 28th, 2008 at 11:01 pm
OK, apparently I’m back.
AC, let me try to explain this to you…
Wal Mart is anti-Target. Sam Walton HATED Target. The board of directors at Wal Mart plot to destroy Target. Wal Mart wants to be the only choice for the masses in every market possible. And Target feels the same about Wal Mart. They are at battle for the hearts & minds of the consumer.
According to your logic, we would have to assume that if Wal Mart was a big box retail conglomerate, they must love other big box retail conglomerates. Therefore, since Wal Mart hates Target, & vice versa, Target must be the opposite of a big box retail conglomerate… Perhaps a small non-profit that distributes surplus cheese to the poor.
No they are both big box retail conglomerates in competition for the hearts & minds of the masses & both seek to economically destroy the other.
Socialism & fascism are two sides of the same coin. Both are Command & Control economic systems, where the state is the supreme planner & the individual is subservient to the collective society, and the society serves the State. There are only very small differences between socialism & fascism.
Free Market Conservativism (classical liberalism) is the polar opposite of all command & control economic systems. It depends on individual FREEDOM & private property rights. The government serves the people.
As far as 1930s lefties fighting for the Republicans in spain rather than the Franco’s… they preferred Wal Mart (USSR) over Target (Italy & Germany). To offer this as proof that Fascism is the opposite of Socialism is a sophomoric non-sequitur, but I’ve never accused you or any other lefty of being logical.
October 28th, 2008 at 11:03 pm
I guess my retorts to Sir Fool are being rerouted to moderator purgatory.
October 29th, 2008 at 1:25 pm
Sorry for the double post, moderation took far longer than usual.