the Stimulus Plan Viewed With Suspicion

There are lots of criticisms of the Stimulus Bill floating around - this suggestion that it is intended to destroy our political & economic systems goes further than most. What do you think?

American Thinker: The Cloward/Piven Strategy of Economic Recovery:
"The assumption that Obama will need the nation to prosper in order to protect the 2010 mid-term election incorrectly assumes that he esteems free market capitalism. He does not. Rather than win through superior ideas and policies, the Democrat plan for success in the mid-term elections is to win by destroying political opposition.

Obama adheres to the Saul Alinksy Rules for Radicals method of politics, which teaches the dark art of destroying political adversaries. However, that text reveals only one front in the radical left's war against America. The Cloward/Piven Strategy is another method employed by the radical Left to create and manage crisis. This strategy explains Rahm Emanuel's ominous statement, 'You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.'

The Cloward/Piven Strategy is named after Columbia University sociologists Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. Their goal is to overthrow capitalism by overwhelming the government bureaucracy with entitlement demands. The created crisis provides the impetus to bring about radical political change.

. . .
Making an already weak economy even worse is the intent of the Cloward/Piven Strategy. It is imperative that we view the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan's spending on items like food stamps, jobless benefits, and health care through this end goal. This strategy explains why the Democrat plan to "stimulate" the economy involves massive deficit spending projects. It includes billions for ACORN and its subgroups such as SHOP and the Neighborhood Stabilization Program. Expanding the S-Chip Program through deficit spending in a supposed effort to "save the children" only makes a faltering economy worse.

If Congress were to allow a robust economy, parents would be able to provide for their children themselves by earning and keeping more of their own money. Democrats, quick to not waste a crisis, would consider that a lost opportunity.

. . . .
Because these programs are financed with deficit spending, the effect of the Cloward/Piven Strategy becomes doubly destructive. Talk about a perfect storm! The Democrat stimulus plan is a mechanism whose goal is the destruction of the traditional American way of life. It is bitter irony that the American taxpayer will actually fund the destruction of his own ability to live according to the values of our Founding Documents. It is not alarmist to identify this situation as a coup d'etat."

In these discussions, we need to be thankful that Congressional Representatives get re-elected every two years. I think the Democrats will overreach, and end up getting replaced by conservatives in 2010 who will begin to withdraw us from this socialist experiment.

Our Problems Can't be Fixed by the Congress That Caused Them

This article by Harvey Golub is on Senator John Kyl's recommended reading list - I'm glad I found it.
Click the link to read the entire article.

I Vote No Confidence in Congress - WSJ.com:
"In recent months, Congress has displayed a fundamental lack of understanding of how our economy and our financial markets actually work. Members believe they can say a bank is likely to become insolvent and that will not lead to a run on the bank, or say a major insurance company is in trouble and not have insurance stocks tank. They believe they can extend a $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) beyond its charter and not have every institution under the sun try to get what they believe is cheap capital.

Most significantly, although Congress is a large cause of the collapse of the home-mortgage market (witness the folly of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac), members believe the markets are too stupid to recognize Congress's culpability and will maintain confidence in Congress's ability to resolve the financial crisis."

We Are All Socialists Now?

Through buying vast blocks of stock in the nation's largest banks, our government has come close to nationalizing this industry. If we don't sell this stock when these troubles are through, then we will have taken a significant steps towards socialism.

It has taken us generations to get to this European Style nanny-state, and it may take generations to reverse this trend. Reversal is important because as a (European) socialist country; the inevitable poor economy will cost us our leadership of the free world, and force us to become a client state of a more successful country like China or India.

In addition if we continue to educate citizens to be dependent on government for every need, we will lose the pioneering spirit and the inventiveness that has carried us through the last few decades.

We Are All Socialists Now | Newsweek Business | Newsweek.com: "The interview was nearly over. on the Fox News Channel last Wednesday evening, Sean Hannity was coming to the end of a segment with Indiana Congressman Mike Pence, the chair of the House Republican Conference and a vociferous foe of President Obama's nearly $1 trillion stimulus bill. How, Pence had asked rhetorically, was $50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts going to put people back to work in Indiana? How would $20 million for 'fish passage barriers' (a provision to pay for the removal of barriers in rivers and streams so that fish could migrate freely) help create jobs? Hannity could not have agreed more. 'It is … the European Socialist Act of 2009,' the host said, signing off. 'We're counting on you to stop it. Thank you, congressman.'

. . . Whether we want to admit it or not—and many, especially Congressman Pence and Hannity, do not—the America of 2009 is moving toward a modern European state.

We remain a center-right nation in many ways—particularly culturally, and our instinct, once the crisis passes, will be to try to revert to a more free-market style of capitalism—but it was, again, under a conservative GOP administration that we enacted the largest expansion of the welfare state in 30 years: prescription drugs for the elderly. People on the right and the left want government to invest in alternative energies in order to break our addiction to foreign oil. And it is unlikely that even the reddest of states will decline federal money for infrastructural improvements.

. . .
Bush brought the Age of Reagan to a close; now Obama has gone further, reversing Bill Clinton's end of big government. The story, as always, is complicated. Polls show that Americans don't trust government and still don't want big government. They do, however, want what government delivers, like health care and national defense and, now, protections from banking and housing failure. During the roughly three decades since Reagan made big government the enemy and "liberal" an epithet, government did not shrink. It grew. But the economy grew just as fast, so government as a percentage of GDP remained about the same."

Baby boomers need to consider whether retiring in the soft lap of the Nanny-State is worth the cost to future generations. The current economic stimulus legislation effectively borrows tax dollars from our grand-children (and their children) - a cost they may find difficult to bear.