Obama's job summit - Maybe we should wear ribbons to show we care?

Now that we’ve gotten a peek into Obama’s ideas for job growth I am more convinced than ever that he is more than inexperienced, he is clueless. There are so many things about the so-called “job summit” that prove this administration focus is on paving a single lane highway to socialism and their sudden attention to the plight of unemployed Americans is nothing more than political window dressing to quiet the murmuring peasants so his circle of brilliant advisors can continue with the work that is truly important to the “Hammer and Sickle Gang”.

The list of those that were invited to Obama’s job summit should say more about the President’s focus than anything else. While everyone knows that small business is responsible for 80% of the jobs that exist in the country; the true essence of small business was not represented in Thursday’s job summit. There were representatives for three companies invited by the Obama administration as “small businesses” but when you look at who they are, they were hardly representative of companies that create the types of jobs that this summit was reportedly focused on.

The first, Air Tractor, is a manufacturer of small specialty aircraft. While I am sure they make a positive contribution to the economy, their employees require special skills and their product line serves a niche market; neither of which describes a company that has the potential to expand very much beyond where they already are.

Next is Diversapack. Diversapack is a manufacturer of flexible packaging for a myriad of products such as paper towels. While Diversapack is a manufacturer that is certainly qualified to speak on job creation within small business, one of the members of the owner’s group may have had more to do with their invitation than what they produce and how many people they hire; that member is Andrew Young. Most of Mr. Young’s experience lies in politics within the Democratic Party. How convenient that Mr. Obama found a willing ally right there in the halls of small business!

Andrew Young served in Congress for Georgia’s 5th Congressional district for just over four years until 1977 when he was appointed by President Jimmy Carter as the Ambassador to the United Nations. Mr. Young was replaced as the Ambassador to the UN by Donald McHenry after the election of Ronald Reagan but did not leave politics. He was elected Mayor of Atlanta Georgia and held that office from 1982 until 1990 when he ran an unsuccessful race for Governor of Georgia.

Even though Diversapack is a company that would be deeply harmed if the Climate Bill were passed into law, Andrew Young and Barack Obama are kindred spirits where political ideology is concerned. After Mr. Young left public office, his work in community development and education was his principal vehicle to promote and advance an almost religious belief in what he considers social and economic justice. He firmly believes in the globalization of government and in international policies to create “socially responsible for-profit corporations”. For those that have never heard that term before, socially responsible for-profit corporations is radical leftist speak for the nationalization of industry. Chavez’s Venezuela has a lot of “socially responsible for-profit corporations” these days and will have a lot more of them before he’s done. In other words, Young is just another Democrat that feels it is his duty to improve world conditions with generous amounts of your money and is part of the problem, not the solution.

Oddly enough, none of Young’s core principals create jobs. In fact, his core beliefs call for the destruction of the American economy and the redistribution of our wealth and industry to poorer nations. Much as Japan’s idea of a perfect baseball game is one that ends in a tie, the globalists idea of a perfect world is one were everyone has the same amounts of wealth and opportunity even if that wealth and opportunity is considered poverty by our current standard of living.

The last so-called small business invited to the job summit was the Binary Group. Binary Group is an IT or Information Technologies company headed by Rose Wang. Ms. Wang has personally consulted or worked as principal technologist on Binary Group strategies for MCI, Fannie Mae, Sprint, Cable & Wireless, the Army, the Federal Railroad Administration, and the Department of Energy. While the company has seen expansive growth under her leadership, there is no doubt that much of that growth is linked to government projects and I suspect it is her knowledge of government based spending that earned her company a seat at the table this past Thursday. It’s just too bad that government based spending does not create lasting jobs with living wages which was proven to be an abysmal failure by the hundreds of billions already spent in stimulus money.

The balance of the attendees were representatives of enormous multi-national corporations which have proven interests in creating jobs in whatever country will give them the lowest possible cost for labor, representatives of Princeton and Columbia Universities which are metaphorical kitchens that specialize in cooking up global Socialist cuisine, labor unions which are quite possibly the only entity in this nation responsible for killing more jobs and destroying more companies than the Federal Government has and last but not least, environmental groups that are only interested in shifting the US into a “green economy”. Unfortunately, thanks to Cass Sunstein and Van Jones we already know that green initiatives are really tools for redistribution that will cost more American jobs and cripple our economy without one measurable benefit for Earth’s climate or biosphere.

In the end, the job summit was nothing more than a lame attempt to show the unemployed that he (Obama) really cares. If the subject were jobs and the mission was to rescue the economy there would have been more notepads and fewer news cameras there. Obama already knows that the job market will not improve as long as business cannot predict their short term liabilities from taxes and government mandates. It is the President’s own policies that are preventing business from committing to expanding the work force. Healthcare, Cap and Trade, Card Check…there is nothing in any of those goals that does not spell doom for business and they frankly, business is refusing to play the game until they know what the rules will be.

Of course it doesn’t help when the Senate policy has shifted from consent of the governed to the buying and selling of votes because they have become so blatantly partisan. Oh Mary! I bet you thought I forgot you! Nope, it’s Monday so it’s time to remind everyone about the spotlight that Harry Reid has shown squarely upon our favorite political prostitute, Mary Landrieu. Remember Mary? She sat on the fence during the healthcare debate until Harry-the Senate Pimp-Reid offered her $300 million dollars for her vote. To give her credit, $300 million is an awful lot of money…after all, it’s not like he waved a twenty dollar bill at her in some dark hallway of the Capitol Building.

Yes, $300 million is a lot of money. In fact, since it is linked to a cut in Medicaid reimbursements that Louisiana will be exempted from in the healthcare bill, it is representative of what this will cost other states that don’t have someone “hooking” for them in Congress. It’s a shame for other states that are already in financial trouble that these cuts in Medicaid reimbursements will only deepen their budgetary problems. But hey, this is healthcare we are talking about!

We must, as a compassionate nation, make sure that illegal immigrants and all of those products of the welfare state that have never even held a job before have access to affordable healthcare insurance and to provide it for them, if need be. So what if states like California, New York, Florida or Arizona to name just a few, have to lay off hundreds of teachers and police officers; it is all for the common good. So what if our infrastructure collapses and our mass transportation network screeches to a halt; if we can pass the healthcare bill, millions will lose their jobs so less people will need those things anyway. So what if the CBO score is a lie because the bill takes in ten years worth of income but only pays out six years of benefits to give the illusion of breaking even; if we start to add too much to the national debt after the first ten years we can always raise taxes again.

Oh Mary, you are going to be an awfully popular person. Of course Harry told you that the exemption will expire right? I believe the exempted states would have to have been able to qualify for Federal Disaster aid for seven of the last ten years. Katrina struck in 2005 so you still have a couple of years before your State will be absorbing those funding cuts just like everyone else. Then you will be even more popular! Even if your constituents can’t understand the wonderful thing you did for them and wind up voting you out of office; fear not! We will never forget you here at the Vigilance Project where every Monday is Mary Landrieu Day!

Paul

Cloward-Pivens- The Community Organizer Playbook

This is probably the most important piece I have presented on the Vigilance Project. I must give credit to Glenn Beck for bringing Cloward and Pivens out of the shadows and to Discoverthenetworks.org for assembling so much information on groups and people that would prefer to remain hidden from view. This is long but please read it in its entirety. Trust me; you will understand why when you reach the end. This is where all the loose strings begin to merge and the fabric of what is happening starts to take shape.

First proposed in 1966 and named after Columbia University sociologists Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, the "Cloward-Piven Strategy" is designed to create conditions that will lead to the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, eventually driving society into crisis and economic collapse.

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 clamored over the "crisis strategy" or "Cloward-Piven Strategy," as it is now called. Many saw this as an ultimate weapon for the radical’s arsenal.

In their 1966 article, Cloward and Piven claimed that the ruling classes used welfare to weaken the poor and that through providing a meager social safety net; the rich only sought to prevent rebellion. Poor people can advance only when "the rest of society is afraid of them," Cloward told The New York Times in 1970. Cloward and Pivens wrote: 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.

The key to this rebellion would be to expose the inadequacy of the welfare state. Cloward-Piven's early promoters named radical organizer Saul Alinsky as their inspiration. "Make the enemy live up to their 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.

Cloward and Piven noted that the number of Americans barely surviving on welfare probably represented less than half of those that were technically eligible for full benefits. They proposed a "massive drive to recruit the poor onto the welfare rolls." Cloward and Piven postulated that if even a fraction of the potential welfare recipients demanded their entitlements; it would bankrupt the system. The result would be "a profound financial and political crisis" that would create "powerful forces … for major economic reform at the national level.

The “Strategy” 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, left wing 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 grasp at this idea for relief from the chaos and they would apply pressure on Washington to implement it. With every major city erupting into anarchy, Washington would have to act.

This “Trojan Horse” movement would seem to have the purpose of providing material help to the needy while concealing the real objective of drafting poor people into service as revolutionary soldiers in order to jam the bureaucratic machine and bring the system to a complete halt. Fear, chaos, violence and economic collapse would all be part of such a breakdown forcing society into 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 the strategy. His followers invaded welfare offices across the United States, bullying social workers and loudly demanding every penny to which the law "entitled" them. By 1969, NWRO claimed a paid membership of 22,500 families, with 523 chapters across the nation. Curiously enough, Wade Rathke was an organizer for the NWRO before moving on to found ACORN and SEIU. What a coincidence!

The New York Times commented on Wiley’s efforts: “These methods proved effective”. "The flooding succeeded beyond Wiley's wildest dreams," wrote 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 moderate economic conditions. 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 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which imposed time limits on federal welfare, along with strict eligibility and work requirements. Surprisingly, both Cloward and Piven attended the White House signing of the bill as guests of President Clinton.

Cloward and Piven never again revealed their intentions as openly as they had in their 1966 article. Even so, their activism in subsequent years continued the tactic of attempting to overload the system. When the public caught on to their welfare scheme, Cloward and Piven simply moved on, applying pressure to other areas of the bureaucracy that appeared to have had weaknesses.

In 1982, devoted followers of the Cloward-Piven strategy founded a new "voting rights movement," which claimed 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 another former NWRO organizer named Hulbert James.

ACORN, Project Vote and Human SERVE, lobbied energetically for the so-called Motor-Voter law, which Bill Clinton signed into law in 1993. The Motor-Voter bill is largely responsible for swamping the voter rolls with invalid voter registrations signed in the name of deceased, ineligible or non-existent people, 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 the intimidation of election officials through frivolous lawsuits, unfounded charges of "racism" and "disenfranchisement," and direct action street protests. Just as they swamped America's welfare offices in the 1960s, Cloward-Piven clones 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 as 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 Soros’s support, the Cloward-Piven strategy continues to provide a blueprint for some of the Left's most ambitious campaigns.

So what do we actually have here? A strategy concocted by two radial sociologists designed to cripple the U.S. economy and force their idea of social justice on an unwitting society. Cloward-Piven follower, George Wiley, forms NWRO to test the theory which ultimately bankrupts New York City. Former NWRO organizers Wade Rathke and Zach Polett form ACORN to continue the strategy on a national level. Zach Polett goes on to form ACORN front group “Project Vote” in an effort to use the same tactics on the electoral system in the United States to steer future elections and to insure that election results are so tainted that the electoral process in America is disrupted.

But wait! There’s more! The Cloward-Piven strategy worked so well that the next level of radicals, many of which work in or have direct access to the White House and seek a single, unified, one world socialist government, have latched onto these principals to sow the seeds of America’s final hours. In fact, at least part of the push to enact a universal healthcare system in this country is linked to efforts to further disrupt our financial security and to nudge America into an acceptance of more, and even larger, socialist programs to prepare them for “the plunge”.

George Soros is one of the major figures in this conspiracy and has billions behind him to put it in play. His direct funding supports groups that continue to chip away at our current social programs to further the successes of Cloward and Piven. His Open Society Institute leads a world wide effort to export this strategy abroad for all the same reasons. Among other projects, Cloward and Piven’s own group HumanServe, is very active in (get this) Lebanon and Israel. Nothing fishy about that…right?

George Soros supports groups that in turn, support the Congressional Progressive Caucus. The group “Shadow Party” was conceived and organized principally by George Soros, Hillary Clinton and Harold McEwan Ickes. It consists of more than five-dozen unions, activist groups, and think tanks. Their primary function is to insure the continued election of radicals to the United States government; the same radicals that were originally brought to power by Project Vote and other Soros funded voting rights groups. Do you still think this is all far fetched? An internet search can uncover most of these links and you can follow the strings from one to another to another until the web is visible.

Tomorrow we will discuss the connections between Cloward-Pivens, the radical left and the new home of global Marxists, the environmental movement.

Paul

The Story of Stuff

The Story of Stuff is a film based on a story by Annie Leonard. Annie Leonard is a critic of excessive consumerism and is most known for this animated film about the life-cycle of material goods.

The film is little more than an anti-capitalist tome designed to convince its viewers that America not only consumes more than its fair share of the planets resources, but we are happily destroying entire third world nations, eco-systems and even people to feed our insatiable appetite for “stuff”. The film makes these assumptions using an almost child-like pursuit of half truths to make its case and is just another new wave, radical environmentalist view of the evils of the American lifestyle. In previous posts I have discussed that the reason why the environmental movement has become so anti-American and so anti-Capitalist is because the environmental movement has been infiltrated and is in fact, the new home of Marxist and Globalist front groups.

The film starts with the assertion that we spend too much on defense, so much so that even though she chose to use the figure of a person to represent the government, she was tempted to use a tank instead. It then goes on to explain that although we only have 5% of the world’s population, we consume 30% of the planets resources. In fact, according Ms. Leonard, we have consumed all of our own resources so we are now “trashing” foreign lands and exploiting foreign peoples to take their resources. She was nice enough to explain that it’s not really our fault because those evil American businesses make us watch all those advertisements that force us to go out and buy and buy and buy and it’s that rampant consumerism that drives the search for even more resources.

The film continues to explain that the cycle that keeps products on our store shelves blindly pollutes the planet, drives people out of their ancestral lands directly into abusive jobs in deadly cities and the pollution that is created to access the resources is just the tip of the iceberg as the manufacturing process wantonly dumps more pollutants into the environment and then those rotten thoughtless American consumers use these products and just dispose of them without a care in the world as to where the trash goes in the end.

The “Story of Stuff” is making its rounds through the education system in the United States in yet another attempt to indoctrinate our youth into liberal and progressive beliefs; beliefs that they are concerned are not being pursued by these poor children’s parents. Of course not all schools have been drawn into this, at least not yet. It is something that is still limited to the areas that are liberal strongholds such as the northeast, California, Oregon, Washington, Chicago, etc. However, now that the President has made some fairly radical appointments in the Federal education agencies, we may see materials like this being “approved” for use or worse, mandated as a requirement of receiving Federal education funds. As long as that is a possibility then it is fair to ask “Who is Annie Leonard, what is her background and who funded this movie?”
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Annie Leonard was born 1964 in Seattle, Washington. She went to college in New York at the liberal arts citadel, Barnard College. Leonard has an undergraduate degree from Barnard College and a graduate degree from Cornell University in city and regional planning. She and a friend created GAIA (Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives). She created the hour-long Story of Stuff originally as a talk and was asked many times to make a movie. Finally she made and also stars in, the 20 minute film The Story of Stuff, a web-based documentary about the life-cycle of goods and services.

Leonard is coordinator of GAIA and serves on the boards of International Forum for Globalization and the Environmental Health Fund. She previously held positions with Health Care Without Harm, Essential Information and Greenpeace International, and is currently coordinator of the Funders Workgroup for Sustainable Production and Consumption. In 1992 she testified before the US Congress on the topic of international waste trafficking.

Isn’t it interesting that someone who claims to be a mere environmentalist is involved so deeply in this many political movements, some of which are dedicated to the globalization of world governance? If you recall, Carol Browner, President Obama’s “Climate Czar” and another so-called environmentalist, was found to have ties with “Socialist International”. Ms. Browner was one of 14 members on their “Commission for a Sustainable World Society”. This group was also anti-American and anti-Capitalist and their principal mandate was to support reforms that would bring about “world governance”; in other words, a single all-powerful one world government. Gee….what a coincidence!

The production of the “Story of Stuff” was made possible with grant money from the Tides Center. The Tides Center is a non-profit organization in the United States which provides grants for progressive groups. Tides Center is classified a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization by the IRS. The Tides organization is based in San Francisco and is administratively linked to, but separate from the Tides Foundation. Tides Center and Tides Foundation are part of a family of organizations linked by a commitment to social change, innovation, and responsible stewardship of resources.

Tides Center’s roots lie in the Tides Foundation, founded by Drummond Pike in 1976. In 1977, the Tides Foundation began working with initiative campaigns, an arrangement that was formalized into the Projects Program in 1979. In 1996, this program became Tides Center, an independent, 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Since 1996, Tides Center has provided fiscal sponsorship to over 800 projects with combined revenues of over $700 million, and has worked with well over 1000 projects since the first days as the Projects Program.

Drummond Pike, a former 1960’s Vietnam War protestor and activist, is the CEO of Tides where he used ideas he created to fund programs and projects well outside the mainstream of thought in the United States through the use of donor advised funds. Donor advised funds allowed for the transfer of third party donations so that people that could be politically harmed by a connection with a radical group could use the Tides Foundation to act as a buffer between the donor and the eventual recipient. How expedient.

Most people have never heard of the Tides Foundation but you have certainly heard of some of their “donors”. George Soros, David Fenton and Wade Rathke are just a few. Yes, that is the same Wade Rathke that was the founder of ACORN, another squeaky clean example of progressive social conciseness and a devout follower of the Cloward-Pivens Strategy. Similarly, some of the recipients of Tides grants may ring a bell. The Apollo Alliance (one of the crafters of the current stimulus bill), The Campaign to Defend the Constitution (an on-line group created to expand the separation of Church and State to counter what they perceived was the growing power of the religious right) and Traction (a social network for 20-something and 30-something leftists to promote progressive ideals).

The Apollo Alliance may be the most recognizable among the names of grant recipients. If you recall, Van Jones was a member of the Apollo Alliance and the chairman of their New York office is Jeff Jones, one of the co-founders of the Weather Underground and I’m sure you remember them.

People may wonder what the big deal is about schools using “The Story of Stuff”. After all, if couldn’t hurt to promote taking care of the environment. If that was all this was about, I might agree but that is not the whole story of “The Story of Stuff.” It is an assault on Capitalism and America by people whose ultimate goal is eliminating the only the only roadblock left to a global socialist “new world order”. Before the new can take root, the old must be eliminated and their plan is to cripple our economy through the use of devastating environmental restrictions forced on our industries and our people.

Have you noticed that the only nations where sufficient pressure has been brought to bear to pass these insane “greenhouse gas” reduction acts has been in democratic industrial nations? If you take the time to connect the dots; to research the people that are behind these movements and the stated goals of the organizations they belong to, we can only arrive at one conclusion. This is not a loose movement of un-washed tree huggers; it is an orchestrated and well coordinated attack by groups that are seeking to fundamentally change the face of global politics.
Paul