"Is GOP trying to Sabotage Economy to Hurt Obama?”

That’s the headline on yesterday's AP story by Charles Babington. The headline appeared on the main Yahoo page, which is far more heavily trafficked than any newspaper, and was picked up, based on a Google News search, by several hundred newspapers.*snip* The idea was to attribute plausibility to what is in fact a laughable suggestion.

In order to effect the economy, Republicans would have to 1) enact policies that would do one or the other, or 2) block the Democrats from enacting policies that would do one or the other. The Republicans haven’t enacted anything since the Democrats took control of Congress in January 2007, so the theory has to be that the GOP has blocked something that otherwise would have helped. In fact, however, the Democrats have been able to enact the major components of their economic plan, including the stimulus–perhaps the most dismal failure of any legislative initiative in American history–and Obamacare. Democrats have caused discretionary spending to skyrocket and have run up $5 trillion in new debt since President Obama took office. So they have pretty much had their way.

*snip* The AP story offers two possible answers. First, John Boehner has said that he will not agree to another increase in the debt limit unless the Democrats agree to spending cuts. But why would that hurt the economy? If more government spending were the path to prosperity, we would all be lighting cigars with $100 bills. *snip*I created this chart last summer to track federal spending against total payroll jobs. Another year of data is available since then, but the trend lines would be the same. Since the Democrats took control of Congress in 2007, spending has boomed. Has that spending been good for the economy? You be the judge'

It's Obama and the other DemonCrats who are attempting to deliberately destroy the economy.

The Cloward-Piven Strategy of Manufactured Crisis
[Obama's strategy for destroying the economy]
frontpage.americandaughter.com
| August 31, 2008 | Jim Simpson

Liberals self-righteously wrap themselves in the mantle of public spirit. They ardently promote policies promising to deliver the poor and oppressed from their latest misery — policies which can only find solution in the halls of government. But no matter what issue one examines, over the last fifty plus years, the liberal prescription has almost always been a failure.

Why is this so? Why does virtually every liberal scheme result in ever-increasing public spending while conditions seem to get continually worse? There are a number of reasons:

The programs usually create adverse incentives. This is especially true in so-called “anti-poverty” programs. The beneficiaries find government subsidies a replacement for, rather than a supplement to, gainful employment and eventually become incapable of supporting themselves. This in turn creates a dependent culture with its attendant toxic behaviors which demand still more government “remedies.”
The programs create their own industry, complete with scads of “think tanks” and “experts” who survive on government research grants. These are the aptly named “Beltway Bandits.”
They create their own bureaucracies, whose managers conspire with interested members of Congress to continually increase program funding, regardless of merit.
Members of Congress secure votes and campaign donations by extorting them from beneficiaries of such programs, either through veiled threats — “vote for me or those mean Republicans will wipe out your benefits” — or promises of still more bennies.

In short, all develop a vested interest in the program’s survival. But if the result is always more and more government, of government, by government, and for government, with no solution in sight, then why do liberals always see government as the solution rather than the problem?

Similarly, liberals use government to promote legislation that imposes mandates on the private sector to provide further benefits for selected groups. But the results are even more disastrous. For example, weighing the laws or stacking the courts to favor unions may provide short term security or higher pay for unionized labor, but has ultimately resulted in the collapse of entire domestic industries.

Another example is health care. The Dems are always trying to impose backdoor socialized medicine with incremental legislation. Why do you suppose American healthcare is in such crisis? Answer: the government has already become too deeply involved. For example, many hospitals are closing their doors because they are overwhelmed with the burden of caring for indigent patients, illegal immigrants and vagrants who must, by law, be admitted like everyone else, despite the fact that they cannot pay for services. Read about it here — Destroying Our Health Care. The net result is reduced availability of care for everyone, exactly the opposite of what liberals claim to want.

To further complicate things, liberal jurists and lawyers have created new theories of liability that utilize the legal system as a means to further redistribute income. This too, has resulted in higher costs and prices in affected industries, higher insurance costs, or in some cases, complete elimination of products or services.

Liberals’ endless pursuit of “rights” for different groups also does little but create increasing divisions in our society. Liberal policy pits old against young, men against women, ethnic and racial groups against one another, even American citizens against illegal aliens, all in the name of “equality.” The only result is anger, tension and equal misery for all.

How does any of this improve our lot?

Finally, when companies relocate overseas to avoid the high cost of unionized labor and heavy domestic regulation, liberals sarcastically excoriate them for “outsourcing” America. Yet, when it comes to certain domestic industries, liberals in Congress suddenly become free marketers and choose to buy from overseas contractors rather than domestic suppliers. This happened most recently with a huge military contract being outrageously awarded to the heavily subsidized European consortium, AIRBUS, over America’s own Boeing. Since liberals claim to be so determined to “save the American worker,” what gives?

You have to take a step further back and ask some fundamental questions. Why is the liberal public policy record one of such unmitigated disaster? I mean, even the worst batter hits one occasionally. No one bats zero. No one that is, except liberals.

Prior to the Republican takeover in Congress in 1994, Democrats had over fifty years of virtually unbroken power in Congress with substantial majorities most of the time. With all the time and money in the world — trillions spent — they couldn’t fix a single thing, not one. Today’s liberal has the same complaints, and the same old tired solutions. 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?

When things go bad all the time, despite the best efforts of all involved, I suggest to you something else is at work — something deeper, more malevolent.

I submit to you that it is not a mistake, the failure is deliberate!

There is a method to the madness, and the method even has a name: the Cloward-Piven Strategy. It was first elucidated in the 1960s by a pair of radical leftist Columbia University professors, Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven:

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.

[Part II of this article will explore those organizations created to implement the Cloward-Piven strategy and their ties to the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama.]

The Complete Cloward-Piven Series

The Cloward-Piven Strategy, Part I: Manufactured Crisis
The Cloward-Piven Strategy, Part I — print copy
The Cloward-Piven Strategy, Part II: Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis
The Cloward-Piven Strategy, Part II — print copy
The Cloward-Piven Strategy, Part III: Conspiracy of the Lemmings
The Cloward-Piven Strategy, Part III — print copy
Hate Crimes Legislation — Back Door Censorship
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Also see (from David Horowitz's DiscoverTheNetworks.org) ...

THE CLOWARD-PIVEN STRATEGY (CPS):

http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=7522
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Cloward, Piven and the Fundamental Transformation of America

Tuesday, January 05, 2010
By Glenn Beck

Meet Richard Cloward and Francis Fox Piven,
authors of the Cloward-Piven strategy

"I'm going to give you a hard concept to get your arms around: It's the concept that there are people in this country who want to intentionally collapse our economic system."-Glenn Beck

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,582097,00.html

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