Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis
America
waits with bated breath while Washington struggles to bring the U.S.
economy back from the brink of disaster. But many of those same
politicians caused the crisis, and if left to their own devices will do so again.
His fears were
warranted as the Motor Voter law has since been cited as a major
opportunity for vote fraud, especially for illegal immigrants, even
terrorists. According to the Wall Street Journal: "After 9/11, the Justice Department found that eight of the 19 hijackers were registered to vote..."
Conspicuous in their absence are any connections at all with any other group, moderate, or even mildly leftist. They are all radicals, firmly bedded in the anti-American, communist, socialist, radical leftist mesh.
Despite
the mass media news blackout, a series of books, talk radio and the
blogosphere have managed to expose Barack Obama's connections to his
radical mentors -- Weather Underground bombers William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, Communist Party member Frank Marshall Davis and others. David Horowitz and his Discover the Networks.org have also contributed a wealth of information and have noted Obama's radical connections since the beginning.
Yet, no one to my knowledge has yet connected all
the dots between Barack Obama and the Radical Left. When seen together,
the influences on Obama's life comprise a who's who of the radical
leftist movement, and it becomes painfully apparent that not only is
Obama a willing participant in that movement, he has spent most of his
adult life deeply immersed in it.
But even this doesn't fully describe
the extreme nature of this candidate. He can be tied directly to a
malevolent overarching strategy that has motivated many, if not all, of
the most destructive radical leftist organizations in the United States
since the 1960s.
The Cloward-Piven Strategy of Orchestrated Crisis
In an earlier post,
I noted the liberal record of unmitigated legislative disasters, the
latest of which is now being played out in the financial markets before
our eyes. Before the 1994 Republican takeover, Democrats had sixty years
of virtually unbroken power in Congress - with substantial majorities
most of the time. 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?
One
of two things must be true. Either the Democrats are unfathomable
idiots, who ignorantly pursue ever more destructive policies despite
decades of contrary evidence, or they understand the consequences of
their actions and relentlessly carry on anyway because they somehow
benefit.
I
submit to you they understand the consequences. For many it is simply a
practical matter of eliciting votes from a targeted constituency at
taxpayer expense; we lose a little, they gain a lot, and the politician
keeps his job. But for others, the goal is more malevolent - the failure is deliberate. Don't laugh. This method not only has its proponents, it has a name: the Cloward-Piven Strategy. It describes their agenda, tactics, and long-term strategy.
The Strategy was first elucidated in the May 2, 1966 issue of The Nation
magazine by a pair of radical socialist Columbia University professors,
Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. David Horowitz summarizes
it as:
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.
Cloward and Piven were inspired by radical organizer [and Hillary Clinton mentor] Saul Alinsky:
"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 word of every law and statute, every Judeo-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. (Courtesy Discover the Networks.org)
Newsmax rounds out the picture:
Their strategy to create political, financial, and social chaos that would result in revolution blended Alinsky concepts with their more aggressive efforts at bringing about a change in U.S. government. To achieve their revolutionary change, Cloward and Piven sought to use a cadre of aggressive organizers assisted by friendly news media to force a re-distribution of the nation's wealth.
In their Nation article, Cloward and Piven were specific about the kind of "crisis" they were trying to create:
By crisis, we mean a publicly visible disruption in some institutional sphere. Crisis can occur spontaneously (e.g., riots) or as the intended result of tactics of demonstration and protest which either generate institutional disruption or bring unrecognized disruption to public attention.
No matter where the strategy is implemented, it shares the following features:
- The offensive organizes previously unorganized groups eligible for government benefits but not currently receiving all they can.
- The offensive seeks to identify new beneficiaries and/or create new benefits.
- The overarching aim is always to impose new stresses on target systems, with the ultimate goal of forcing their collapse.
Capitalizing
on the racial unrest of the 1960s, Cloward and Piven saw the welfare
system as their first target. They enlisted radical black activist George Wiley,
who created the National Welfare Reform Organization (NWRO) to
implement the strategy. Wiley hired militant foot soldiers to storm
welfare offices around the country, violently demanding their "rights."
According to a City Journal article by Sol Stern,
welfare rolls increased from 4.3 million to 10.8 million by the
mid-1970s as a result, and in New York City, where the strategy had been
particularly successful, "one person was on the welfare rolls... for
every two working in the city's private economy."
The movement's impact on New York City was jolting: welfare caseloads, already climbing 12 percent a year in the early sixties, rose by 50 percent during Lindsay's first two years; spending doubled... The city had 150,000 welfare cases in 1960; a decade later it had 1.5 million.
The
vast expansion of welfare in New York City that came of the NWRO's
Cloward-Piven tactics sent the city into bankruptcy in 1975. Rudy Giuliani cited Cloward and Piven by name as being responsible for "an effort at economic sabotage." He also credited Cloward-Piven
with changing the cultural attitude toward welfare from that of a
temporary expedient to a lifetime entitlement, an attitude which
in-and-of-itself has caused perhaps the greatest damage of all.
Cloward
and Piven looked at this strategy as a gold mine of opportunity. Within
the newly organized groups, each offensive would find an ample pool of
foot soldier recruits willing to advance its radical agenda at little or no pay,
and expand its base of reliable voters, legal or otherwise. The
radicals' threatening tactics also would accrue an intimidating
reputation, providing a wealth of opportunities for extorting monetary
and other concessions from the target organizations. In the meantime,
successful offensives would create an ever increasing drag on society.
As they gleefully observed:
Moreover, this kind of mass influence is cumulative because benefits are continuous. Once eligibility for basic food and rent grants is established, the drain on local resources persists indefinitely.
The
next time you drive through one of the many blighted neighborhoods in
our cities, or read of the astronomical crime, drug addiction, and
out-of-wedlock birth rates, or consider the failed schools, strapped
police and fire resources of every major city, remember Cloward and
Piven's thrill that "...the drain on local resources persists
indefinitely."
ACORN, the new tip of the Cloward-Piven spear
In 1970, one of George Wiley's protégés, Wade Rathke
-- like Bill Ayers, a member of the radical Students for a Democratic
Society (SDS) -- was sent to found the Arkansas Community Organizations
for Reform Now. While NWRO had made a good start, it alone couldn't
accomplish the Cloward-Piven goals. Rathke's group broadened the
offensive to include a wide array of low income "rights." Shortly
thereafter they changed "Arkansas" to "Association of" and ACORN went nationwide.
Today ACORN is involved in a wide array of activities, including housing,
voting rights, illegal immigration and other issues. According to
ACORN's website: "ACORN is the nation's largest grassroots community
organization of low-and moderate-income people with over 400,000 member
families organized into more than 1,200 neighborhood chapters in 110
cities across the country," It is perhaps the largest radical group in
the U.S. and has been cited for widespread criminal activity on many fronts.
Voting
On voting rights, ACORN and its voter mobilization subsidiary, Project Vote, have been involved nationwide in efforts to grant felons the vote and lobbied heavily for the Motor Voter Act of 1993, a law allowing people to register at motor vehicle departments, schools, libraries and other public places.
That law had been sought by Cloward and Piven since the early1980s and they were present, standing behind President Clinton at the signing ceremony.
ACORN's voter rights tactics follow the Cloward-Piven Strategy:
- 1. Register as many Democrat voters as possible, legal or otherwise and help them vote, multiple times if possible.
- 2. Overwhelm the system with fraudulent registrations using multiple entries of the same name, names of deceased, random names from the phone book, even contrived names.
- 3. Make the system difficult to police by lobbying for minimal identification standards.
In this effort, ACORN sets up registration sites all over the country and has been frequently cited
for turning in fraudulent registrations, as well as destroying
republican applications. In the 2004-2006 election cycles alone, ACORN
was accused of widespread voter fraud in 12 states. It may have swung the election for one state governor.
ACORN's
website brags: "Since 2004, ACORN has helped more than 1.7 million low-
and moderate-income and minority citizens apply to register to vote."
Project vote boasts 4 million. I wonder how many of them are dead? For
the 2008 cycle, ACORN and Project Vote have pulled out all the stops.
Given their furious nationwide effort, it is not inconceivable that this
presidential race could be decided by fraudulent votes alone.
Barack Obama ran ACORN's Project Vote in Chicago and his highly successful voter registration drive was credited with getting the disgraced former Senator Carol Moseley-Braun elected. Newsmax reiterates Cloward and Piven's aspirations for ACORN's voter registration efforts:
By advocating massive, no-holds-barred voter registration campaigns, they [Cloward & Piven] sought a Democratic administration in Washington, D.C. that would re-distribute the nation's wealth and lead to a totalitarian socialist state.
Illegal Immigration
As I have written elsewhere,
the Radical Left's offensive to promote illegal immigration is
"Cloward-Piven on steroids." ACORN is at the forefront of this movement
as well, and was a leading organization among a broad coalition of
radical groups, including Soros' Open Society Institute, the Service Employees International Union (ACORN founder Wade Rathke also runs a SEIU chapter), and others, that became the Coalition for Comprehensive Immigration Reform. CCIR fortunately failed to gain passage for the 2007 illegal immigrant amnesty bill, but its goals have not changed.
The
burden of illegal immigration on our already overstressed welfare
system has been widely documented. Some towns in California have even
been taken over by illegal immigrant drug cartels.
The disease, crime and overcrowding brought by illegal immigrants
places a heavy burden on every segment of society and every level of
government, threatening to split this country apart at the seams. In the
meantime, radical leftist efforts to grant illegal immigrants
citizenship guarantee a huge pool of new democrat voters. With little
border control, terrorists can also filter in.
Obama aided ACORN as their lead attorney in a successful suit he brought
against the Illinois state government to implement the Motor Voter law
there. The law had been resisted by Republican Governor Jim Edgars, who
feared the law was an opening to widespread vote fraud.
ACORN's
dual offensives on voting and illegal immigration are handy
complements. Both swell the voter rolls with reliable democrats while
assaulting the country ACORN seeks to destroy with overwhelming new
problems.
Mortgage Crisis
And
now we have the mortgage crisis, which has sent a shock wave through
Wall Street and panicked world financial markets like no other since the
stock market crash of 1929. But this is a problem created in Washington long ago. It originated with the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), signed into law in 1977 by President Jimmy Carter. The CRA was Carter's answer to a grassroots activist movement started in Chicago, and forced banks to make loans to low income, high risk customers. PhD economist and former Texas Senator Phil Gramm has called it: "a vast extortion scheme against the nation's banks."
ACORN aggressively sought to expand loans to low income groups using the CRA as a whip. Economist Stan Leibowitz wrote in the New York Post:
In the 1980s, groups such as the activists at ACORN began pushing charges of "redlining"-claims that banks discriminated against minorities in mortgage lending. In 1989, sympathetic members of Congress got the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act amended to force banks to collect racial data on mortgage applicants; this allowed various studies to be ginned up that seemed to validate the original accusation.
In
fact, minority mortgage applications were rejected more frequently than
other applications-but the overwhelming reason wasn't racial
discrimination, but simply that minorities tend to have weaker finances.
ACORN
showed its colors again in 1991, by taking over the House Banking
Committee room for two days to protest efforts to scale back the CRA. Obama represented ACORN in the Buycks-Roberson v. Citibank Fed. Sav. Bank, 1994 suit against redlining. Most significant of all,
ACORN was the driving force behind a 1995 regulatory revision pushed
through by the Clinton Administration that greatly expanded the CRA and
laid the groundwork for the Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac borne financial
crisis we now confront. Barack Obama was the attorney representing ACORN in this effort. With this new authority, ACORN used its subsidiary, ACORN Housing, to promote subprime loans more aggressively.
A 1995 strengthening of the Community Reinvestment Act required banks to find ways to provide mortgages to their poorer communities. It also let community activists intervene at yearly bank reviews, shaking the banks down for large pots of money.Banks that got poor reviews were punished; some saw their merger plans frustrated; others faced direct legal challenges by the Justice Department.
Flexible
lending programs expanded even though they had higher default rates
than loans with traditional standards. On the Web, you can still find
CRA loans available via ACORN with "100 percent financing . . . no
credit scores . . . undocumented income . . . even if you don't report
it on your tax returns." Credit counseling is required, of course.
Ironically,
an enthusiastic Fannie Mae Foundation report singled out one paragon of
nondiscriminatory lending, which worked with community activists and
followed "the most flexible underwriting criteria permitted." That
lender's $1 billion commitment to low-income loans in 1992 had grown to
$80 billion by 1999 and $600 billion by early 2003.
The lender they were speaking of was Countrywide, which specialized in subprime lending and had a working relationship with ACORN.
Investor's Business Daily added:
The revisions also allowed for the first time the securitization of CRA-regulated loans containing subprime mortgages. The changes came as radical "housing rights" groups led by ACORN lobbied for such loans. ACORN at the time was represented by a young public-interest lawyer in Chicago by the name of Barack Obama. (Emphasis, mine.)
Since
these loans were to be underwritten by the government sponsored Fannie
Mae and Freddie Mac, the implicit government guarantee of those loans
absolved lenders, mortgage bundlers and investors of any concern over
the obvious risk. As Bloomberg reported: "It is a classic case of socializing the risk while privatizing the profit."
And
if you think Washington policy makers cared about ACORN's negative
influence, think again. Before this whole mess came down, a Democrat-sponsored bill
on the table would have created an "Affordable Housing Trust Fund,"
granting ACORN access to approximately $500 million in Fannie Mae and
Freddie Mac revenues with little or no oversight.
Even
now, unbelievably -- on the brink of national disaster -- Democrats
have insisted ACORN benefit from bailout negotiations! Senator Lindsay
Graham reported last night (9/25/08) in an interview with Greta Van
Susteren of On the Record that Democrats want 20 percent of the bailout money to go to ACORN!
This
entire fiasco represents perhaps the pinnacle of ACORN's efforts to
advance the Cloward-Piven Strategy and is a stark demonstration of the
power they wield in Washington.
Enter Barack Obama
In
attempting to capture the significance of Barack Obama's Radical Left
connections and his relation to the Cloward Piven strategy, I
constructed following flow chart. It is by no means complete. There are
simply too many radical individuals and organizations to include them
all here. But these are perhaps the most significant.
The
chart puts Barack Obama at the epicenter of an incestuous stew of
American radical leftism. Not only are his connections significant, they
practically define who he is. Taken together, they constitute a who's
who of the American radical left, and guiding all is the Cloward-Piven
strategy.
Conspicuous in their absence are any connections at all with any other group, moderate, or even mildly leftist. They are all radicals, firmly bedded in the anti-American, communist, socialist, radical leftist mesh.
Saul Alinsky
Most
people are unaware that Barack Obama received his training in
"community organizing" from Saul Alinsky's Industrial Areas Foundation.
But he did. In and of itself that marks his heritage and training as
that of a radical activist. One really needs go no further. But we have.
Bill Ayers
Obama
objects to being associated with SDS bomber Bill Ayers, claiming he is
being smeared with "guilt by association." But they worked together at
the Woods Fund. The Wall Street Journal added substantially to our knowledge by describing in great detail Obama's work over five years with SDS bomber Bill Ayers on the board of a non-profit, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, to push a radical agenda on public school children. As Stanley Kurtz states:
"...the issue here isn't guilt by association; it's guilt by participation. As CAC chairman, Mr. Obama was lending moral and financial support to Mr. Ayers and his radical circle. That is a story even if Mr. Ayers had never planted a single bomb 40 years ago."
Also included in the mix is Theresa Heinz Kerry's favorite charity, the Tides Foundation.
A partial list of Tides grants tells you all you need to know: ACLU,
ACORN, Center for American Progress, Center for Constitutional Rights (a
communist front,) CAIR, Earth Justice, Institute for Policy Studies
(KGB spy nest), National Lawyers Guild (oldest communist front in U.S.),
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), and practically
every other radical group there is. ACORN's Wade Rathke runs a Tides
subsidiary, the Tides Center.
Carl Davidson and the New Party
We have heard about Bomber Bill, but we hear little about fellow SDS member Carl Davidson. According to Discover the Networks, Davidson was an early supporter of Barack Obama and a prominent member of Chicago's New Party,
a synthesis of CPUSA members, Socialists, ACORN veterans and other
radicals. Obama sought and received the New Party's endorsement, and
they assisted with his campaign. The New Party also developed a strong
relationship with ACORN. As an excellent article on the New Party observes: "Barack Obama knew what he was getting into and remains an ideal New Party candidate."
George Soros
The
chart also suggests the reason for George Soros' fervent support of
Obama. The President of his Open Society Institute is Aryeh Neier,
founder of the radical Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). As
mentioned above, three other former SDS members had extensive contact
with Obama: Bill Ayers, Carl Davidson and Wade Rathke. Surely Aryeh
Neier would have heard from his former colleagues of the promising new
politician. More to the point, Neier is firmly committed to supporting
the hugely successful radical organization, ACORN, and would be certain
back their favored candidate, Barack Obama.
ACORN
Obama
has spent a large portion of his professional life working for ACORN or
its subsidiaries, representing ACORN as a lawyer on some of its most
critical issues, and training ACORN leaders. Stanley Kurtz's excellent
National Review article, "Inside Obama's Acorn." also describes Obama's ACORN connection in detail. But I can't improve on Obama's own words:
I've been fighting alongside ACORN on issues you care about my entire career (emphasis added). Even before I was an elected official, when I ran Project Vote voter registration drive in Illinois, ACORN was smack dab in the middle of it, and we appreciate your work. - Barack Obama, Speech to ACORN, November 2007 (Courtesy Newsmax.)
It would be telling to know if Obama, during his years at Columbia, had occasion to meet Cloward and study the Cloward-Piven Strategy.
I
ask you, is it possible ACORN would train Obama to take leadership
positions within ACORN without telling him what he was training for? Is
it possible ACORN would put Obama in leadership positions without
clueing him into what his purpose was?? Is it possible that this most
radical of organizations would put someone in charge of training its trainers, without him knowing what it was he was training them for?
As a community activist for ACORN; as a leadership trainer for ACORN; as a lead organizer for ACORN's Project Vote;
as an attorney representing ACORN's successful efforts to impose Motor
Voter regulations in Illinois; as ACORN's representative in lobbying for
the expansion of high risk housing loans through Fannie Mae and Freddie
Mac that led to the current crisis; as a recipient of their assistance
in his political campaigns -- both with money and campaign workers; it is doubtful that he was unaware of ACORN's true goals. It is doubtful he was unaware of the Cloward-Piven Strategy.
Fast-forward to 2005 when an obsequious, servile and scraping Daniel Mudd, CEO of Fannie Mae spoke at the Congressional Black Caucus swearing in ceremony
for newly-elected Illinois Senator, Barack Obama. Mudd called, the
Congressional Black Caucus "our family" and "the conscience of Fannie
Mae."
In 2005, Republicans sought to rein in Fannie and Freddie. Senator John McCain was at the forefront of that effort. But it failed due to an intense lobbying effort put forward by Fannie and Freddie.
In
his few years as a U.S. senator, Obama has received campaign
contributions of $126,349, from Fannie and Freddie, second only to the
$165,400 received by Senator Chris Dodd, who has been getting donations
from them since 1988. What makes Obama so special?
His closest advisers are a dirty laundry list of individuals at the heart of the financial crisis: former Fannie Mae CEO Jim Johnson; Former Fannie Mae CEO and former Clinton Budget Director Frank Raines; and billionaire failed Superior Bank of Chicago Board Chair Penny Pritzker.
Johnson had to step down as adviser on Obama's V.P. search after this gem came out:
An Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO) report[1]
from September 2004 found that, during Johnson's tenure as CEO, Fannie
Mae had improperly deferred $200 million in expenses. This enabled top
executives, including Johnson and his successor, Franklin Raines, to
receive substantial bonuses in 1998.[2] A 2006 OFHEO report[3]
found that Fannie Mae had substantially under-reported Johnson's
compensation. Originally reported as $6-7 million, Johnson actually
received approximately $21 million.
Obama denies ties to Raines but the Washington Post calls him a member of "Obama's political circle."
Raines and Johnson were fined $3 million by the Office of Federal
Housing Oversight for their manipulation of Fannie books. The fine is
small change however, compared to the $50 million Raines was able to
obtain in improper bonuses as a result of juggling the books.
Most significantly,
Penny Pritzker, the current Finance Chairperson of Obama's presidential
campaign helped develop the complicated investment bundling of subprime
securities at the heart of the meltdown. She did so in her position as
shareholder and board chair of Superior Bank. The Bank failed in 2001,
one of the largest in recent history, wiping out $50 million in
uninsured life savings of approximately 1,400 customers. She was named
in a RICO class action law suit but doesn't seem to have come out of it
too badly.
As
a young attorney in the 1990s, Barack Obama represented ACORN in
Washington in their successful efforts to expand Community Reinvestment
Act (CRA) authority. In addition to making it easier for ACORN groups to
force banks into making risky loans, this also paved the way for banks
like Superior to package mortgages as investments, and for the
Government Sponsored Enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to
underwrite them. These changes created the conditions that ultimately lead to the current financial crisis.
Did they not know this would occur? Were these smart people, led by a Harvard graduate, unaware of the Econ 101 concept of moral hazard
that would result from the government making implicit guarantees to
underwrite private sector financial risk? They should have known that
freeing the high-risk mortgage market of risk, calamity was sure to
ensue. I think they did.
Barack
Obama, the Cloward-Piven candidate, no matter how he describes himself,
has been a radical activist for most of his political career. That
activism has been in support of organizations and initiatives that at
their heart seek to tear the pillars of this nation asunder in order to
replace them with their demented socialist vision. Their influence has
spread so far and so wide that despite their blatant culpability in the
current financial crisis, they are able to manipulate Capital Hill
politicians to cut them into $140 billion of the bailout pie!
God
grant those few responsible yet remaining in Washington, DC the
strength to prevent this massive fraud from occurring. God grant them
the courage to stand up in the face of this Marxist tidal wave.
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