Undocumented Democrats Unmolested

Work Site Arrests of Illegals Fall Dramatically

Arrests of illegal immigrant workers have dropped precipitously under President Obama, according to figures released Wednesday.

Criminal arrests, administrative arrests, indictments and convictions of illegal immigrants at work sites all fell by more than 50 percent from fiscal 2008 to fiscal 2009.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said the administration has made such advances on border security that Congress should now work on legalizing illegal immigrants.


Harry Reid currently has 58 votes for nationalizing health care. The Republicans are standing firm against it. If they can't get over the top, there's always plan B. Amnesty. Create 20 million new Democrats to put new backbone in the Donks who are wavering.

The Cloward-Piven Strategy. Meet the lovely Frances Fox Piven.

The Cloward-Piven Strategy is being discussed as the bedrock belief system of Barack Hussein Obama. If you haven't heard much about it, you will soon. Mark Levin has posted some background here. Piven was married to Richard Andrew Cloward. You can jump ahead to the 25 minute mark to get into the meat of their strategy. More on the strategy below.

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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.

Discoverthenetworks

Focus on Blanche Lincoln to stop Health Care Rip-off by the Democrats

A new Zogby poll suggests that Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) could seriously endanger her 2010 re-election by supporting the health care bill.

In initial match-ups, Lincoln leads state Sen. Gilbert Baker by 41%-39%, within the ±4.5% margin of error, and has a healthier lead of 45%-29% over state Sen. Kim Hendren.

In a series of follow-up questions, respondents were then asked how they would feel if Lincoln supported the bill. In a new match-up with Baker, Lincoln's previous edge of 41%-39% turns into a Baker lead of 49%-37%.

TPM

Washington, D.C. Address 355 Dirksen Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510-0404
Phone: 202-224-4843
Fax: 202-228-1371

District Address 101 East Waterman
Dumas, AR 71639
Phone: 870-382-1023
Fax: 870-382-1026

District Address 912 West Fourth Street
Little Rock, AR 72201
Phone: 501-375-2993
Fax: 501-375-7064

District Address 4 South College Avenue, Suite 205
Fayetteville, AR 72701
Phone: 479-251-1224
Fax: 479-251-1410

District Address Miller County Courthouse 400 Laurel Street, Suite 101
Texarkana, AR 71854
Phone: 870-774-3106
Fax: 870-774-7627

District Address Federal Building 615 South Main Street, Suite 315
Jonesboro, AR 72401
Phone: 870-910-6896
Fax: 870-910-6898

Can Obama be so disengaged that he let Eric Holder do his own thing?

"Many of the lost jobs – in construction, finance, and outsourced manufacturing and services – are gone forever"

Certainly and emphatically no less qualified than Barrack Hussein Obama

A Tale of Two American Economies

Nouriel Roubini
From Wednesday's Globe and Mail
Published on Tuesday, Nov. 17, 2009 6:32PM EST
Last updated on Wednesday, Nov. 18, 2009 5:35PM EST

While the United States recently reported 3.5 per cent GDP growth in the third quarter, suggesting that the most severe recession since the Great Depression is over, the American economy is actually much weaker than official data suggest. In fact, official measures of GDP may grossly overstate growth in the economy, as they don't capture the fact that business sentiment among small firms is abysmal and their output is still falling sharply. Properly corrected for this, third-quarter GDP may have been 2 per cent rather than 3.5 per cent.

The story of the U.S. is, indeed, one of two economies. There is a smaller one that is slowly recovering and a larger one that is still in a deep and persistent downturn.

Consider the following facts. While America's official unemployment rate is already 10.2 per cent, the figure jumps to a whopping 17.5 per cent when discouraged workers and partially employed workers are included. And, while data from firms suggest that job losses in the past three months were about 600,000, household surveys, which include self-employed workers and small entrepreneurs, suggest a number above two million.

Moreover, the total effect on labour income – the product of jobs times hours worked times average hourly wages – has been more severe than that implied by the job losses alone, because many firms are cutting their workers' hours, placing them on furlough or lowering their wages as a way to share the pain.

Many of the lost jobs – in construction, finance, and outsourced manufacturing and services – are gone forever, and recent studies suggest that a quarter of U.S. jobs can be fully outsourced over time to other countries. Thus, a growing proportion of the work force – often below the radar screen of official statistics – is losing hope of finding gainful employment, while the unemployment rate (especially for poor, unskilled workers) will remain high for a much longer period of time than in previous recessions.

Consider also the credit markets. Prime borrowers with good credit scores and investment-grade firms are not experiencing a credit crunch at this point, as the former have access to mortgages and consumer credit while the latter have access to bond and equity markets.

But non-prime borrowers – about one-third of U.S. households – do not have much access to mortgages and credit cards. They live from paycheque to paycheque – often a shrinking paycheque, owing to the decline in hourly wages and hours worked. And the credit crunch for non-investment-grade firms and smaller firms, which rely mostly on access to bank loans rather than capital markets, is still severe.

Or consider bankruptcies and defaults by households and firms. Larger firms – even those with large debt problems – can refinance their excessive liabilities in or out of court, but an unprecedented number of small businesses are going bankrupt. The same holds for households, with millions of weaker and poorer borrowers defaulting on mortgages, credit cards, auto loans, student loans and other consumer credit.

Did the Chinese scare Obama with some hard cold facts?

Consider also what is happening to private consumption and retail sales. Recent monthly figures suggest a rise in retail sales. But, because the official statistics capture mostly sales by larger retailers and exclude the fall by hundreds of thousands of smaller stores and businesses that have failed, consumption looks better than it really is.

And, while higher-income and wealthier households have a buffer of savings to smooth consumption and avoid having to increase savings, most lower-income households must save more, as banks and other lenders cut back on home-equity loans and lower limits on credit cards. As a result, the household savings rate has risen from zero to 4 per cent of disposable income. But it must rise further, to 8 per cent, in order to reduce the high leverage of the household sector.

To be sure, the U.S. government is increasing its budget deficits to put a floor under demand. But most state and local governments that have experienced a collapse in tax revenues must sharply retrench spending by firing policemen, teachers and firefighters while also cutting welfare benefits and social services for the poor. Many state and local governments in poorer regions are at risk of bankruptcy without a massive federal bailout.

Moreover, income and wealth inequality is rising again. Poorer households are at greater risk of unemployment, falling wages or reductions in hours worked, all leading to lower labour income, whereas on Wall Street, outrageous bonuses have returned with a vengeance. With the stock market rising and home prices still falling, the wealthy are becoming richer, while the middle class and the poor – whose main wealth is a house rather than equities – are becoming poorer and being saddled with an unsustainable debt burden.

So, while the United States may technically be close to the end of a severe recession, most of America is facing a near-depression. Little wonder, then, that few Americans believe that what walks like a duck and quacks like a duck is actually the phoenix of recovery.

Your Tax Dollars at Work

UN: Fight climate change with free condoms

By MARIA CHENG, AP Medical Writer Maria Cheng, Ap Medical Writer Wed Nov 18, 8:21 am ET

LONDON – The battle against global warming could be helped if the world slowed population growth by making free condoms and family planning advice more widely available, the U.N. Population Fund said Wednesday.

The agency did not recommend countries set limits on how many children people should have, but said: "Women with access to reproductive health services ... have lower fertility rates that contribute to slower growth in greenhouse gas emissions."

"As the growth of population, economies and consumption outpaces the Earth's capacity to adjust, climate change could become much more extreme and conceivably catastrophic," the report said.

The problems faced by Soviet forces in Afghanistan carry echoes for Nato

Not that you need it, but here is some bad news and then some even worse news.

First the bad.

The Senate will soon increase the national debt limit to above $13 trillion. That is paltry compared to what follows. The next ten years show a hyperbolic curve to financial ruin, brought to you by politicians that can't help themselves.

Democrats are nervous, twitchy, and are considering attaching a debt increase provision to the Defense Department spending bill. They will claim they are doing that for patriotic reasons. They are spending us into the abyss for God and country.

Meanwhile the twin sources of economic calamity and declining American security, Iraq and Afghanistan, grind on and on. Democracy is expensive you know, especially for the tribes of Islam, tribes who hate each other intensely and trust each other even less.

Now the worse news.

How do we get out of Iraq and Afghanistan, when we decide it is time to get out? Forget the reasons that will be fabricated for leaving, how do we do it?

The BBC examines how the Soviets did it. First let's examine the Soviet time-line in Afghanistan which spanned ten years. (We are in our eighth year.)

• 1979 - Brezhnev sends in troops
• 1988 - USSR pledges to withdraw
• 1989 - final Soviet withdrawal
• Soviet deaths - estimated at 15,000
• Afghan deaths - estimated at one million
• The Soviets spent a paltry $12 billion. (To date the US has spent $1,300 billion in Iraq and Afghanistan.)

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Soviet lessons from Afghanistan

Andrew North
BBC News

All the most senior ministers were at the Afghan strategy meeting.

They knew things were not going well, but from their leader there was a whiff of panic.

"We just need to be sure that the final result does not look like a humiliating defeat: to have lost so many men and now abandoned it all... in short, we have to get out of there."

Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev - the speaker of those words - was understandably alarmed.
It was June 1986, almost a year since he had taken the decision to start withdrawing Soviet troops from Afghanistan and hand over more responsibility to the government there.

But Soviet losses, already above 10,000, kept mounting.

With conflicting signals this week about the direction of Western policy in Afghanistan, there is a hint of the same kind of panic and indecision.

Soviet exit strategy

US President Barack Obama is still deciding whether to send in thousands of US reinforcements.

Yet the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown - facing ever-greater opposition to the Afghan war - has been highlighting possibilities for UK troops to pull back in some areas next year.

It is less than two weeks since he was saying: "We cannot, must not and will not walk away."

But as Mr Gorbachev found, getting out is at least as difficult as staying in.

It took almost four years to pull out entirely - because of a combination of dithering over strategy and last-ditch efforts by Moscow to prop up its client government in Kabul in the hope of maintaining some pride and influence.

The former Soviet leader's difficulties are detailed in previously secret transcripts of Politburo meetings and diary entries recently released by the Washington-based National Security Archive.

They make sobering reading for British and American leaders, as they decide whether to double-up or cut their losses in Afghanistan.

There are certainly differences - not least America's determination to make the Soviet withdrawal as costly as possible in blood and treasure.

Lost battle

But there are echoes too of the difficulties the US and its allies face now.


By the late 1980s, Moscow's exit strategy was basically the same as Nato's today - to build up an allied government in Kabul with sufficient trained army and police forces to defend itself, thereby allowing foreign troops to leave.

But even with the backing of a 100,000-strong Soviet army and billions of rubles in aid, the Afghan government struggled to establish its legitimacy and authority much beyond the capital - much like President Hamid Karzai's Western-backed administration today.

This bleak assessment of the situation in late 1986 by the Soviet armed forces commander, Marshal Sergei Akhromeev, sounds eerily familiar.

"Military actions in Afghanistan will soon be seven years old," Mr Akhromeev told Mr Gorbachev at a November 1986 Politburo session.

"There is no single piece of land in this country which has not been occupied by a Soviet soldier. Nonetheless, the majority of the territory remains in the hands of rebels.

"The whole problem is that military results are not followed up by political actions. At the centre there is authority; in the provinces there is not.

"We control Kabul and the provincial centres, but on occupied territory we cannot establish authority. We have lost the battle for the Afghan people".

Familiar problems

By that point, Soviet trainers had created an Afghan army 160,000-strong - double the size of the force Nato has trained so far - together with thousands of much-feared secret policemen.

Yet once Soviet forces had left, they could do little more than defend Kabul and a few other cities.
Only massive military aid, coupled with incompetence and in-fighting among the US-backed mujahideen opposition, allowed the Afghan government Moscow left behind to cling on in Kabul for a few more years before finally collapsing.

There were familiar problems too with the financial assistance Moscow gave.

It hoped the funds would bolster the capacity of the Afghan government and pay for projects that would benefit people, winning hearts and minds.

However corruption rendered much of its useless.

As the Politburo discussed a new aid request from Kabul in January 1987, Marshal Sergei Sokolov said: "In 1981, we gave them 100m roubles of free assistance. And all of that went to the elite. And there was nothing in the hamlets - no kerosene, no matches."

"Saved or created" means save face by creating numbers

Recovery.gov reported that 30 jobs were saved or created with $761,420 of federal stimulus spending in Arizona's 15th Congressional District. One problem with the claim -- the state has only eight districts

Talladega County of Alabama, claimed that it had saved or created 5,000 jobs from only $42,000 in government money -- which would amount to $8.40 in annual income per job if each position received an equal amount of funding....

...nearly $6.4 billion was used to "create or save" nearly 30,000 jobs in 440 non-existing districts, including in New Mexico's 4th, 22nd, 35th and 40th Districts. New Mexico has three Congressional Districts.

"I was alarmed to see that Democrats have spent $3,582,587 to create five jobs in Florida's 86th congressional district, " said Rep. Ginny Brown-Waite, R-Fla. "In the fighting 53rd they spent $460,000 of your taxpayer dollars to create zero jobs."

Florida has 25 U.S. Congressional Districts.


The same accountants are being used by Pelosi and Reid to turn a three trillion dollar health care bill into one that only reportedly costs $999,999,999,999.99, because that last penny is the deal breaker.