Rush’s “fatherly” advice to Barack is worth the eight minutes, but there were a few good quotes that I picked out.

You’re going to keep plugging for the same agenda which is going to destroy this country even more.  It makes me think, Barack, that’s your objective.

So what Mr. Limbaugh seems to be suggesting is that there is a possibility that Mr. Obama feels that crises are times of opportunity.  That sounds somewhat like the Cloward-Piven strategy, doesn’t it?

Mr. President, I’ll tell you, you are not a leader.  You are an agitator and an organizer and a process guy.  But you are not a leader.  It is you who are doing something wrong.  The people in Virginia do not like it.  The people in New Jersey don’t like it.  The people in Massachusetts don’t like it!  The people in Massachusetts and around the country have the ability to inform themselves outside of your sycophant press corps.  And they are doing so.

Can you imagine where we would be without Fox News, talk radio, and the internet as alternate sources of information?  Most of us remember the days when our news choices consisted of one newspaper and the four television news sources, all of whom seemed to follow the lead of the New York Times when it came to deciding what and how to report.  Even people who dislike conservative radio or television have to admit that the diversity of news and opinion available today is good for political freedom and a good check on government.

Without the Counter Media combination of Fox News, the internet, and talk radio, many debates and decisions would have turned out very differently.  Without the Counter Media socialized health care legislation would have passed last summer.  In fact, Hillary Care would have passed in 1993 were it not for Rush Limbaugh and people like him who made up the only Counter Media in those days.  Back then, before the World Wide Web only we computer people were on the internet, and Fox News was still three years away.

Without the blogosphere Counter Media the attempt by CBS’s Rather and Mapes to use forged documents in an attempt to take down George W. Bush on the eve of the 2004 elections would have worked.  Were it not for the Counter Media, Al ‘Forrest’ Gore would likely have successfully stolen the Presidential election in Florida in 2000 and would have been sitting in the Oval Office on September 11^th, 2001.  Think about that one.  I do not support a lot of what Bush-43 did in office, but can you imagine what President Gore or President Kerry would have done?  Enough said.

Without the Counter Media, Americans would never have heard a whisper about the ACORN prostitution sting videos and consequently ACORN would still be participating in the census!  Most recently and perhaps most importantly, without the Counter Media we would never have heard about the Climategate scandal and therefore would not have so successfully pushed back against Cap and Trade and the Copenhagen Conference spectacle.

Has it occurred to you, Mr. President, even once, that you’re not as cool as you think you are?  Has it occurred to you that you are screwing up?  And if it has, are you happy about that?  Has it occurred to you that you have a great deal to learn and that you need to take your own measure?

One big problem with personality cults, beyond the obvious downside of influencing a large group of people to make poor decisions with dreadful unintended consequences, is that the object of the personality cult comes to believe in the myths surrounding his cult status.  President Obama is not only a True Believer when it comes to the tenets of Marxism.  Barack Obama is a True Believer when it comes to Barack Obama.  Like Tracy Morgan’s character on 30 Rock, Obama’s entourage of yes-men has intoxicated the President on his own Kool Aid, leaving him in a make believe world that shelters the President from genuine public opinion.  A month or two before the 2008 elections I heard historian Victor Davis Hanson warn of candidate Obama’s dangerous combination of hubris and naiveté.  As President, Mr. Obama has done absolutely nothing to disprove that spot-on observation.  In fact, every self-absorbed speech from the President only seems to underscore it more.

You seem to think that this country needs to be torn down so that YOU can rebuild it.  But you were elected to be President, not some kind of dictator.  You must operate within the confines of the Constitution.

Tearing it down to rebuild it, huh?  If you skipped reading about the Cloward-Piven Strategy above, I will give you another chance here.

You can listen to Rush’s “fatherly advice” to Obama here:

Chicago Tribune, 1934

This could have been penned today.  The wagon is labeled Young Pinkies from Columbia and Harvard (two institutions quite familiar to President Obama) and an intoxicated occupant is drinking from a bottle labeled “POWER”!

The Lenin lookalike, who knows that “it worked in Russia“, is writing a “PLAN OF ACTION FOR U.S.” which includes:

SPEND! SPEND! SPEND! Under the Guise of Recovery – Bust the Government - Blame the Capitalists for the Failure – Junk the Constitution and Declare a Dictatorship

That “bust the government, blame the capitalists“ line may have been part of the inspiration for the Cloward-Piven Strategy formulated three decades later by, coincidentally, two Columbia University sociologists.

I must admit that when I ask myself what this administration is thinking with respect to the economy – why they seem to demonstrate a complete lack of ECON-101 understanding, my mind always finds its way back to Cloward-Piven.

Named after Columbia University sociologists Richard Cloward and Frances Piven, the general idea behind the strategy is to intentionally overload the government system so much that it causes a crisis and collapses with a subsequent loss of confidence that Cloward and Piven hoped would “hasten the fall of capitalism.”  I am reminded that my late father, a conservative, had a good but incredibly liberal friend who would bluntly argue that the cost of avoiding violent class warfare in America is the network of welfare programs that keep the poor complacent.  As much as the idea disgusts me I have always thought that he was at least partly right.  The article at DiscoverTheNetworks points out that the basic idea behind the Cloward-Piven strategy is to break the system in order to make the poor miserable enough to rebel.  Not surprisingly to those of us watching the tactics being employed by the current ruling party, the author also mentions their connections to the radical Saul Alinsky, whose ideas apparently so inspired President Obama:

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.

Saul Alinsky

The author points out that the approach called for “cadres of aggressive organizers” to use “demonstrations to create a climate of militancy.”  In fact, Cloward and Piven recruited an organizer named George Wiley to do just that.  His group, the National Welfare Rights Organization, enjoyed such successes in New York that they did cause the desired collapse:

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.

These are precisely the same tactics employed by groups like ACORN to intimidate elected officials into acquiescing to their demands, such as forcing lending institutions to make loans to people with bad credit.  The author argues that this approach requires surprise and that “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 fact, he points out that followers of the Cloward-Piven strategy successfully shifted their focus to our electoral system, with sinister results:

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.

In an article at the Washington Times subtitled Using the poor to tear down capitalism, Col. Robert Chandler points this out and shows that it not only was proven viable when the approach successfully bankrupted New York City in the 70s but that our sub-prime financial crisis was engineered with these very tactics:

The socialist test case for using society’s poor and disadvantaged people as sacrificial “shock troops,” in accordance with the Cloward-Piven strategy, was demonstrated in 1975, when new prospective welfare recipients flooded New York City with payment demands, bankrupting the government. As a consequence, New York state also teetered on the edge of financial collapse when the federal government stepped in with a bailout rescue.

The 2008 financial crisis has all of the earmarks of a Cloward-Piven strategy assault against the capitalist system. Stanley Kurtz of the Ethics and Public Policy Center recently explained that “community organizers” (1) “intimidate banks into making high risk loans to customers with poor credit,” (2) “occupy private offices, chant inside bank lobbies, and confront executives at their homes,” and, through these thuggish tactics, (3) compel “financial institutions to direct hundreds of millions dollars in mortgages to low-credit customers.” “In other words,” Mr. Kurtz explained during a presentation at the Hudson Institute’s Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civic Renewal, “community organizers help to undermine America’s economy by pushing the banking system into a sink-hole of bad loans.”

We have seen the results of the Cloward-Piven strategy, from the sub-prime crisis to [always left-wing] voter fraud in any swing state, these people are playing for keeps.  Working in the trenches with these very people, attempting to destroy the system from within so that he could remake it, was our community organizer president.  Saul Alinksy would be so proud.

We need to stop underestimating our opponents and the depths to which they will sink to force their statist ideology on Americans.