Obama Fails in Berlin

“There are many people in the world who really don't understand-or say they don't-what is the great issue between the free world and the Communist world. Let them come to Berlin!” — John F. Kennedy, Berlin, June 26, 1963.

Barack Obama returned to Berlin on Wednesday, almost five years to the day from when he delivered his famous "Victory Column" speech that cemented his reputation as an international rock star. Unfortunately, his reception this time was a lot different.

An estimated 200,000 people turned out in July 2008 to see then Candidate Obama deliver an address in front of one of Germany's most notable landmarks. He took a lot of criticism from Germans for his choice of location and from his U.S. political opponents who weren't happy about seeing an American presidential hopeful being adored by tens of thousands of foreigners. The Berlin event was larger than any of his U.S. campaign stops, though some critics even disputed the crowd figures. (Republicans in the heat of a campaign, obviously found other flaws with the speech.)

Fast forward to 2013, and many are now saying that Obama's reputation is "tarnished," by his recent snooping scandals, his extensions of the war on terror, and the hard luck realities of failing to deliver on all your promises. (Even ones you didn't really make.) He's "demystified" and "no longer a superstar" in German eyes. Now he's just another world leader on a state visit, and whatever problems people have with U.S. policy are on his shoulders.

And instead of opening up the speech to the whole city, Obama spoke in front only about 5,000-6,000 spectators, all of them invited guests.

The White House pool report revealed that only 6,000 will be in attendance for Obama's Berlin speech on Wednesday:

“The stage for the president's speech is set up on the East side of the Brandenburg Gate, in the old East Berlin. The sun is pounding down and there are around 6,000 invited guests according to German authorities. There are bleachers set up either side of the square, with a big two story riser facing the stage which has a row of bullet proof glass and 12 U.S., German and EU flags and the grand backdrop of the Gate. There is a large standing crowd between the bleachers.”

The actual crowd count at the Brandenburg Gate speech was 4,500.

His speech on Wednesday (you can click here for a detailed comparison vs. the 2008 speech) called for a reduction in global nuclear weapons (through more negotiations with Russia) and defended the idea of Western intervention in Syria. Hammering on the theme of "peace with justice," he also discussed closing Guantanamo Bay and taking action on climate change, calling it the "global flood of our time." (Much more on that here.) But it was notably different in tone than 2008's more sweeping view of the world, which was a speech more fitting for a candidate.

Nonetheless, directly out of the Brandenburg gate, the president commenced with injecting race and gender into the conversation when he said "Angela and I don't exactly look like previous German and American leaders." Obama then informed the audience, consigned by invitation to stand in the blistering heat listening to his blather, that Michelle, Malia, and Sasha, rather than endure his grueling speech, chose instead to experience the "beauty and the history of Berlin" (at American taxpayers' expense).

But probably the most amazing aspect of Obama's Berlin speech was his typical lack of self-awareness when making assertions that conflict with everything he does. For instance, although President Obama is actively persecuting the "unoriginated birthright of man," he quoted German philosopher Immanuel Kant, who said "freedom is the 'unoriginated birthright of man, and it belongs to him by force of his humanity.'"

Obama even posed questions Americans ask about him:

“Will we live free or in chains? Under governments that uphold our universal rights, or regimes that suppress them? In open societies that respect the sanctity of the individual and our free will, or in closed societies that suffocate the soul?”

In Berlin, Obama attempted to one-up Ronald Reagan's "Peace through Strength" strategy by stealing John F. Kennedy's "Peace with Justice" mantra and scheduled the revision to take place at Brandenburg Gate, where his social justice spiel paled in comparison to authentic Reagan strength.

The president's references were pitiful attempts to support the liberal dream of a daisy-holding, Kumbaya-singing utopia that the human condition prevents.

Ignoring nations stoking the nuclear flames, President "Ich bin ein Dumbkopf" cited JFK's famous 1963 "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech when suggesting that Germans "lift their eyes beyond the dangers of today to the day of peace with justice." Caught up in the rapture of the moment, Obama apparently missed the contradiction in mentioning Kennedy's assassination five months after he promoted "peace with justice."

Speaking of contradictions, Mr. Obama shared that Kennedy's words are "timeless because they call upon us to care more about things than just our own self-comfort." This from a president who's about to embark on a $100 million African vacation, toting along a wife whose "self-comfort" demands recently included bunking in a $3,300-a-night Princess Grace suite in Ireland.

President Obama has been facing increasing scrutiny both at home and abroad as scandal after scandal rocks the administration. From Ireland the president went to Germany to talk about the dangers of global number of nuclear weapons, climate change and his views on social justice.

After encouraging youthful unemployed Germans to relinquish self-comfort, citizen of the world Obama shifted to "For we are not only citizens of America or Germany — we are also citizens of the world. And our fates and fortunes are linked like never before." That is, unless linking "fates and fortunes" means sharing a $3,300-a-night hotel room with Michelle Obama.

Never mentioning pressure cookers, hijacked airplanes, banana hammock bombers, or wild-eyed Muslims gunning down American soldiers, and after riding around in an armored limo and building a mysterious underground bunker beneath the White House, Obama proclaimed, "We may no longer live in fear of global annihilation, but so long as nuclear weapons exist, we are not truly safe."

President Obama also seemed to imply that food stamps and unemployment checks may be the answer to the threat of worldwide terrorism, which he claimed results from the "agony of an empty stomach or the anguish of unemployment."

Then, after dissing Catholic education in Ireland, Obama dredged up sins that penitent nations have already remediated when he unnecessarily brought up intolerance and abuses "based on race, or religion, gender or sexual orientation."

Obama then advanced a concept that he doesn't apply to Christians or American conservatives, which is that "When we stand up for our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters and treat their love and their rights equally under the law, we defend our own liberty as well."

That's when the "Peace with justice" rant began. Obama cited free enterprise and freedom, neither of which he's a huge fan of. From there, he segued into environmentalism, closing Guantanamo, ending the Afghan war, controlling the drones he has surveilling U.S. airspace, undermining the Constitution and calling it "balancing the pursuit of security with the protection of privacy," and meeting moral obligations that have nothing to do with morality.

Funny, Obama proves he's vulnerable to nuclear self-destruction whenever the Teleprompter is unavailable. Yet, he imagines peace can only be realized through sending a message to America's enemies that in a nuclear-aggressive environment the most powerful nation in the world is voluntarily reducing the number of its nuclear warheads.

Not to worry though; Barack quoted James Madison and then claimed that he too is moving "beyond a mindset of perpetual war." The president cited a 2016 'secure nuclear materials' summit, which despite the growing threat of international terrorism, Obama believes is a "step" toward "creating a world of peace with justice."

The problem is that the guy who said "Threats to freedom don't merely come from the outside. They can emerge from within" is the one threatening America's freedom, and the perpetual warfare he speaks of is not America's doing.

Appearing on MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell Reports on Wednesday, NBC's chief White House correspondent Chuck Todd came up with a long list of excuses for President Obama's poor speech performance in Berlin: "I want to give you a little context here there was an attempt to shrink the crowd size. Maybe they would have gotten 25, 30, 40,000 people. President Obama feeds off a crowd very well."

Todd then grasped at other reasons for the lackluster event: ".you had that very distracting glass and you could just see that the President himself wasn't feeding off of the crowd. And I think look, part of it, it was hot. Those folks were out there for two and a half hours it can sap your energy a little bit. And I just wonder if that added a little bit to this."

Barack Obama ended with a Martin Luther King Jr. quote crescendo:

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."

In the end, so too does "loss of freedom in America threaten freedom everywhere." That loss is precisely why, both in Germany and here at home, free people must grasp the potentially harmful impact the 'peace-loving' guy riding around in a million dollar armored vehicle and standing behind eight inches of bulletproof glass seeks to impose on the Western world.

The Cloward–Piven Strategy is Working

“The ultimate objective of this strategy—to wipe out poverty by establishing a guaranteed annual income — will be questioned by some. Because the ideal of individual social and economic mobility has deep roots, even activists seem reluctant to call for national programs to eliminate poverty by the outright redistribution of income.” — Cloward and Piven

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 an African American 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 own book of rules," Alinsky wrote in his 1971 book Rules for Radicals. When pressed to honor every word of every law and statute, every Judeo-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.

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. At this time Barack Obama was a community organizer in Chicago deeply committed to the aims and goals of ACORN and an advocate of the Cloward and Piven Strategy and the tactics of his mentor Saul Alinsky. While Obama’s Acorn connection has not gone entirely unreported, its depth, extent, and significance have been poorly understood. Typically, media background pieces note that, on behalf of Acorn, Obama and a team of Chicago attorneys won a 1995 suit forcing the state of Illinois to implement the federal “motor-voter” bill.

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.

While Acorn holds to NWRO’s radical economic framework and its confrontational 1960’s-style tactics, the targets and strategy have changed. Acorn prefers to fly under the national radar, organizing locally in liberal urban areas — where local legislators and reporters are often “slow to grasp how radical Acorn’s positions really are.” Acorn’s new goals are municipal “living wage” laws targeting “big-box” stores like Wal-Mart, rolling back welfare reform, and regulating banks — efforts styled as combating “predatory lending.” Unfortunately, instead of helping workers, Acorn’s living-wage campaigns drive businesses out of the very neighborhoods where jobs are needed most. Acorn’s opposition to welfare reform only threatens to worsen the self-reinforcing cycle of urban poverty and family breakdown. Perhaps most mischievously Acorn uses banking regulations to pressure financial institutions into massive “donations” that it uses to finance supposedly non-partisan voter turn-out drives.

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.

The now-infamous Cloward-Piven Strategy is a clear roadmap to socialism: get so many people addicted to government entitlements that the economic system collapses, and in the resulting chaos the populace will demand and vote for a new economic system in which everyone is supported by the state.

Sounds logical (if nefarious), and President Obama seems hell-bent on bringing it to fruition in the United States. The problem for Obama’s inner socialist is that he’s also required for appearance’s sake to attempt a rescue of the American economy using Keynesian principles. This self-cancelling combo-strategy is the underlying cause of our economic stagnation.

Last week the Bureau of Labor Statistics released a report that said that the labor force participation rate (LFPR) dropped to 63.6%, the lowest rate since Jimmy Carter was in office. Essentially that means that of the population of 16 year and older, 37.4% of them decided not to work or not to seek work. That’s 88.8 million people! To put that in perspective, when George Bush took office the LFPR was 67.2% and eight years later it was 1.5% lower at 65.7%. It has dropped 2.1% in Barack Obama’s first four years, the most precipitous drop in workforce participation since they started keeping records in 1948.

But percentages only tell you so much. Each of those percentage points represents approximately 2.5 million people. Since Barack Obama became president over 5 million people have simply stopped trying to find a job. If just half of those 5 million people were still looking for jobs, the unemployment rate would actually be 9.4% rather than the official 7.8%. Now some of those are students who chose to go to college because they couldn’t find a job and others are senior citizens who’ve retired from the workforce, but the overwhelming majority of those 5 million are people who have simply given up hope.

And that’s the point, and the problem. Not since the 1970’s have the American people felt so discouraged about the prospects for the nation in general and their individual economic circumstances in particular. For most of American history the notion of having a job, doing something productive for your family and your community was the norm. Barack Obama is seeking to rapidly change that, and he got a good head start during his first term. The President has doubled the number of people on food stamps and he gutted Bill Clinton’s welfare reform. That’s his version of Supply Side Economics, he supplies the benefits and people will be happy to give him four more years. Add to this the regulatory nightmare he has unleashed on businesses and four years of demagoguing those who drive American productivity and you have an ever increasing number of Americans who believe they either can’t or don’t have to find jobs.

For much of the 20th century the United States was looked at as the place to come to seek your fortune, to make or do something with your life, basically where anything was possible. Although Hollywood, Coke, and Levis brought the American Dream to the rest of the world, far more importantly, most Americans were pursuing it here at home, if not living it. Today something altogether different is occurring. As the Gallop poll demonstrated, much diminished is that “Can do” feeling that most Americans had for most of our history, the feeling that prosperity and success were just around the corner and anyone could achieve it if they worked hard enough. America has become a state of dependence, where half the population pays no income taxes and where 40% of the population suckles at the public tit, either in the form of government handouts or as employees of a bloated bureaucracy.

How long can a population survive when fewer and fewer people are supporting an ever increasing population of non-producers? As Cloward and Piven predicted in 1966 you could overload the welfare system in an effort to bring about a redistribution of wealth. If you read their manifesto, you can’t help but recognize their methods in Barack Obama’s policies.

While it’s impossible to know what the future holds, it’s not difficult to wonder what the situation of the country might be in 4 years if the same policies that brought us to where we are today were implemented during the president’s second term.

If Food Stamp growth were to decline to 25% (vs. 50% over the President’s first term) there will still be 60 million Americans on the program. If Social Security Disability (which is at its highest level on record) increases by another 25% as it did in the last four years, a total of 13 million Americans will be on disability. (What’s most heart breaking about this programs is that the rampant fraud and bureaucratic incompetence are keeping benefits out of the hands of the truly needy.) Those measures alone would bring the total of people receiving government checks (i.e. money taken from taxpayers or borrowed that will have to be paid back by taxpayers) from 18% of our population today to almost 23%. Add in the 8 million or so people receiving unemployment benefits and the 4.4 million on welfare and you have over a quarter of the population on the receiving end of some wealth redistribution program. On the workforce side, if the LFPR declines another two percent it will sit at 61.6%, a level not seen since 1977. With a LFPR of 61.6% and an unemployment rate that stayed at today’s 7.9%, we would have only 141 million workers supporting a population of 323 million people verses today’s 144 million supporting a population of 313. That’s 3 million fewer workers supporting a population that would have grown by 10 million! Inverted pyramids like that don’t last for long.

At the end of the day, one has to wonder what exactly were those 65 million voters hoping for when they voted for Barack Obama? If it was more of the same they just might be in luck at least in the short run. It appears that the President plans on doubling down on his policies. He appears to be executing the socialist Cloward Piven Strategy perfectly. While his devotees may be happy with his rhetoric today, they will likely not be happy when his grand strategy succeeds tomorrow. The problem with socialism in America is that it assumes a static nature of the citizenry, i.e. that government can impose whatever requirements on workers and producers and they will have no choice but to comply. Nothing could be farther from the truth. With countries from Australia to Canada to Singapore to Estonia to Denmark offering greater levels of economic freedom, those who fund what the government redistributes have many options available to them. Money, like water, flows to the areas of least resistance and the resistance is increasing in the United States. Eduardo Saverin (of Facebook fame), Tina Turner and a record number of other American citizens are making it clear that do indeed have options. Lots of companies do too. When all of the producers have finally left the country, all that will be left of Barack Obama’s redistributive state will be those who no longer know how to fend for themselves. Somehow I can’t imagine that being the Nirvana that Obama voters were thinking of.

But the economy, while the main focus point of the Cloward and Piven Strategy, it is not the only thing happening in the Obama administration. Their other factor is chaos. Right now the Obama masterminds are overloading the Congress, press, and people with numerous issues that are dulling the senses of the voters. Immigration, gun control, sequesters gay marriage, health care, regulations, crony capitalism, government bail-outs, North Korea, Afghanistan and an overblown and ridiculous budget — a budget that will only reduce the increase in spending, the deficit, and the national debt. All of these factors are creating chaos and diverting the efforts of those in opposition to Obama’s plans.

The Democratic controlled Senate is rushing immigration and gun control bills through the Congress with little or no debate or hearings. The “path to citizenship” proposed in the various proposed immigration bills will add somewhere between 10-20 million new welfare recipients to the mix along with dramatically increasing the cost of health care and bankrupting the states through their Medicare payments thus further overloading the system.

The proposed gun control legislation, while not adding much to the deficit or debt, will increase government control over the citizenry by watering down the Bill of Rights. These measures are only a part of the chaos being fostered by Obama and his minions with little or no oversight from Congress.

While Richard Andrew Cloward is dead Frances Fox Piven is still pushing their strategy of redistribution towards the socialist state. This is a far cry from those men of the Gilded Age who built the greatest economic power in the world and our Founders who gave us the most unrestricted and freest government in the history of the world where life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness were the paramount factors in their thinking. Today the Cloward Piven Strategy seems to be working and our lawmakers are marching in lockstep while the voters are lining up to have their rice bowls filled by Uncle Sam.

Uncle Sam’s Plantation

"Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all." — Frédéric Bastiat, The Law

Prior to the ratification of the 13th Amendment on December 6, 1865 slavery was legal in the United States. The Amendment stated:

“Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”

Prior to the passage of the 13^th Amendment slaves living in states that were at rebellion with the Union (Confederate States) were liberated by executive order issued by Abraham Lincoln through his 1863 Emancipation Proclamation. The proclamation did not affect the Border States and did not abolish slavery. It took a Constitutional amendment to accomplish that.

Prior to abolishing slavery Blacks were considered property of the slave-holding masters. In the South they lived on plantations where they either worked in the fields or houses of their masters. They lived in substandard housing furnished by the plantation owners. They their basic needs of food and clothing were provided by their masters. They were not allowed to learn to read and write — not even the Bible. Their children became property of the masters the moment they were born and they were denied the basic rights of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. If they escaped the plantation and were caught they were severely punished and made an example to other slaves with he sought of fleeing the plantation. Even if they did manage to escape and make it to a free state they had no employable skills other than providing manual labor.

After the passage of the 13^th Amendment many slaves remained on the very same plantations where they been living. With the passage and ratification of the 14th Amendment in 1868 these former slaves were afforded the rights of full citizenship including the right to vote. Section 1 of the 14^th Amendment states:

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the law.”

It did not take long for the politicians and northern carpetbaggers to realize that they had a block of voters ready to be cultivated by merely promising them free stuff, stuff they could not or would not deliver.

It took 100 years for Blacks to gain equality within our civil society. There were periods of racial discrimination, especially in the south and large urban centers where Blacks had migrated to during our participation in World Wars 1 and 2. There was the segregation of Blacks from the military, after they had served during the Civil War and policing the Indians in our western territories, and from federal employment by the progressive Woodrow Wilson. It was not until WWII that Blacks were once again allowed into the military and government service. Due to the actions of Republicans in protecting the righ ts of Blacks most Blacks voted Republicans.

Fast forward to 1964 and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. The Democrats were now in power and wanted to remain in power so they instituted a multitude of government programs designed to put Blacks back on the plantation — Uncle Sam’s Plantation.

Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society is the logical extension of Progressive political thought and FDR’s New Deal. While the Founders held that the task of good government is to secure its citizens’ natural rights, LBJ argued that government must eradicate all external constraints—legal, economic, educational, and environmental—which hamper the “spiritual fulfillment” of its citizens. The extensive regulations and programs of the Great Society are thus meant to guarantee not only the right to pursue happiness but also the full achievement of it.

In his Great Society Speech given at the University of Michigan in 1964 Johnson said:

“Your imagination, your initiative, and your indignation will determine whether we build a society where progress is the servant of our needs, or a society where old values and new visions are buried under unbridled growth. For in your time we have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the Great Society.

The Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we are totally committed in our time. But that is just the beginning.

The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents. It is a place where leisure is a welcome chance to build and reflect, not a feared cause of boredom and restlessness. It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community.

It is a place where man can renew contact with nature. It is a place which honors creation for its own sake and for what is adds to the understanding of the race. It is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.

But most of all, the Great Society is not a safe harbor, a resting place, a final objective, a finished work. It is a challenge constantly renewed, beckoning us toward a destiny where the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our labor.

So I want to talk to you today about three places where we begin to build the Great Society - in our cities, in our countryside, and in our classrooms.”

Lyndon B. Johnson anchored his Great Society program in the Progressive understanding of freedom: Freedom in its fullest sense encompasses more than the formal or legal right to do a thing; freedom entails the ability to affect that thing. Thus the central conceptual element of the Great Society—the purpose of both civil rights and the War on Poverty—is the elimination of any economic, legal, or social hindrances to the achievement of excellence and the “fulfillment of the human spirit.”

The Founders believed that the causes of necessity are rooted in human nature itself, and that a government that seeks to eradicate necessity quickly becomes tyrannical. By contrast, LBJ held that specific government policies and programs, initiated and guided by bureaucratic experts, could overcome the unhappiness and discontent brought about especially by racial injustice and poverty.

Consequently, his Great Society legislation focuses on cities (developing community and aesthetically pleasing spaces), the countryside and the environment at large (engaging in conservation efforts to make beauty accessible to all), and education (funding not only programs and initiatives for all levels of schooling but also educational broadcasting for the public at large).

Declaring that “the Great Society is a place where the City of Man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce, but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community,” LBJ argued for a radically new purpose for the federal government: It would go beyond securing natural rights and seek the fulfillment of the longings of the human soul. This was a far departure for the shining city upon a hill expressed by John Winthorpe in 1630 — a city devoted to God. Johnson and the progressives that followed him wanted an equality of results, not equality of opportunity.

It did not take the Progressives and the Democrat Party to seize the opportunity for creating a permanent block of voters by putting them on Uncle Sam’s Plantation. They did through throwing billions of coercive federal taxpayer dollars at states and counties for welfare programs. The federal dollars were and are used for substandard subsidized housing much like the antebellum South. In fact many of these housing projects are falling apart and lack proper sanitation facilities. They are laced with vermin and are homes for drug pushers and other criminal gangs.

They did it with offering food stamps, WIC, Medicaid, and aid to dependent children where single parenting was promoted. If the father lives in the household the aid is cut. It encourages women to have multiple babies out of wedlock in order to increase their benefit payments. We have generations of teen age girls having children who in turn have children out of wedlock.

According to the New York Times:

“Large racial differences remain:73 percent of black children are born outside marriage, compared with 53 percent of Latinos and 29 percent of whites. And educational differences are growing. About 92 percent of college-educated women are married when they give birth, compared with 62 percent of women with some post-secondary schooling and 43 percent of women with a high school diploma or less, according to Child Trends.”

The children who grow up in these fatherless homes are very likely to fall into gangs and crimes and have little chance at success by escaping the plantation especially when they have criminal records.

While antebellum slave masters forbade slaves from learning to read and write the current serfs of the Uncle Sam’s Plantation are denied this ability by the poor condition of the K-12 school system in on the plantation. The school system is controlled by coercive federal dollars from the Department of Education and the Teachers Unions. Neither is dedicated to education — they are devoted to increasing power and feathering their nests. That’s’ why they fight a system of giving vouchers to parents where they can send their children to private, charter, or better schools. Washington D.C. is a good case in point where the successful voucher program was cancelled by the Obama administration due to pressure from the teachers unions.

According to a report by the AP on Yahoo News In many cases, workers in low-wage positions are not using the training programs their employers offer because they don't even know they exist, the two-part AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research survey of both workers and employers found. Two-thirds of employers said they offer coaching or mentoring programs and 61 percent provide on-the-job training. But only 36 percent of low-wage workers reported that their employers offer such programs.

The ability to move up the career ladder has become more important as America's economic recovery is fueled by a surge in low-wage jobs at restaurants, health care centers and manufacturing sites. Job training and education can play a major role in helping these workers advance their careers and someday reach middle-class status. At the same time, employers say they invest in job training to retain current workers, reduce turnover and improve the quality of products and services.

Yet the surveys revealed a wide disparity between employers and workers in how they view the importance of training programs. While 83 percent of employers said job training is extremely or very important for upward mobility, only half of low-wage workers felt as strongly about additional training. Similarly, 77 percent of employers rated education as extremely or very important, while only 41 percent of low-wage workers rated it similarly.

The burning question here and not addressed in the report is how can young people be trained for jobs and advancement when they have not graduated high school and very low reading and comprehension skills?

One of the largest bribes to keep the serfs on the plantation are food stamps. The House Agriculture Committee has reported out its version of a new farm bill that will cut $16.5 billion over 10 years from funding of SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), once known as food stamps.

The cuts in the House bill exceed those in the Senate bill by $12 billion.

Sixteen-and-a-half billion dollars over a decade amount to a whopping 2 percent cut in SNAP program expenditures, which last year alone came to $78 billion. At a time when we are running trillion-dollar annual federal budget deficits, it's hard to see a 2 percent cut in any large spending program as provocative. Particularly in a program like SNAP, where spending in 2011 was over 400 percent higher than in 2000.

Yet, liberals are predictably ringing the alarm. Assistant House Democratic leader James Clyburn of South Carolina called the cuts "abominable," suggesting they will jeopardize nutrition of children and that it's all about protecting "the wealthy and the well to do."

If cutting back on SNAP spending is about protecting "the wealthy," as Clyburn would have us believe, why do big corporations such as Pepsi, Coca Cola, Kraft Foods and Kroger support and lobby for the program, as Time magazine recently reported?

It's because government-spending programs, even if initiated with the best of intentions, wind up being about interests, not efficiency or compassion.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, 18 million Americans received SNAP benefits in 2000. By 2011, this had grown to 45 million, one in seven Americans.

Liberals tells us that this program's mind-boggling growth is explained by our foundering economy.

But, as Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama points out, spending on this program increased 100 percent from 2001 to 2006, a period over which there was no increase in the rate of unemployment.

From 2007 to 2011, spending increased 135 percent. But CBO attributes only about 65 percent of the dramatic growth in program spending and the number of recipients to the recession.

Here's what else has happened: It has become increasingly easy to qualify for SNAP benefits, the government has been spending more taxpayer funds promoting the program, and the stigma of SNAP, food stamps, being perceived as a welfare program has disappeared.

A New York Times article in 2010 carried the headline, "Once Stigmatized, Food Stamps Find Acceptance." The article notes posters in New York City announcing "Applying for food stamps is easier than ever" and quotes Eric Bost, head of the program under President George W. Bush, saying, "I assure you, food stamps is not welfare."

According to CBO, three-fourths of recipients are "categorically eligible," which means they automatically qualify by virtue of participating in some other federal or state welfare program. They need not be receiving cash benefits from these programs. Simply having received an information pamphlet can be enough.

At one time, recipients received their food-stamp benefits in dollar-denominated paper vouchers presented at the cash register. Now benefits come on a sharp-looking electronic debit card like any credit or debit card.

And the fact that SNAP funds are provided by the federal government, but administered and spent by the states, is a proven formula, as in Medicaid, for undisciplined spending growth.

The only major difference to today’s Federal Plantation in regards to the pre-Civil War plantation is that Uncle Sam’s Plantation has no physical or legal barriers to escape. The members serfs of the plantation are free to leave anytime they wish. The problem is that the Progressive politicians keep bribing them by the offer of more stuff like free cell phones and TVs if they stay. Rather than physical force they use the coercive force of the federal purse to keep them on the plantation where the politicians can control them and garner their votes.

Despite trillions of dollars spent on social programs since the 1960s, there is little evidence that the poor have benefited. In a blistering critique, former welfare mother Star Parker has become an advocate in espousing how government has harmed rather than helped the poor—and what citizens can do to fight back. Parker, the president and founder of the Coalition on Urban Renewal and Education, encourages faith and individual responsibility to empower the poor to escape Uncle Sam’s “sophisticated poverty plantation.

It is other conservative Black leaders and organizations such as CURE and CORE that are leading the way to get Blacks and other poor off Uncle Sam’s Plantation and rise to their full potential. They preaching the same message to Blacks the Frederick Douglas preached after the Civil War. It will take time and some very brave leaders to end the Federal Plantation System.

The most compassionate thing that can be done today is exactly what is not happening: economic growth, job creation and getting folks to work. The path to this end is less government, not more.

The Recipient Class

“Now since man is naturally inclined to avoid pain—and since labor is pain in itself—it follows that men will resort to plunder whenever plunder is easier than work. History shows this quite clearly. And under these conditions, neither religion nor morality can stop it. — Frederick Bastiat, The Law.

Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville (July 29, 1805 – April 16, 1859) was a French political thinker and historian best known for his Democracy in America (appearing in two volumes: 1835 and 1840) and The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856). In both of these works, he explored the effects of the rising equality of social conditions on the individual and the state in western societies.

In 1831 Alexis de Tocqueville, a young French aristocrat and ambitious civil servant, made a nine-month journey throughout America. The result was Democracy in America, a monumental study of the life and institutions of the evolving nation. Tocqueville looked to the flourishing democratic system in America as a possible model for post-revolutionary France, believing that the egalitarian ideals it enshrined reflected the spirit of the age and even divine will. His insightful work has become one of the most influential political texts ever written on America and an indispensable authority on democracy.

Several things de Tocqueville stated in his Democracy in America book are more relevant today than ever:

“The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money.”

“Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom, socialism restricts it. Democracy attaches all possible value to each man; socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number. Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.”

“When the taste for physical gratifications among them has grown more rapidly than their education the time will come when men are carried away and lose all self-restraint. It is not necessary to do violence to such a people in order to strip them of the rights they enjoy; they themselves willingly loosen their hold. They neglect their chief business which is to remain their own masters.”

“Society will develop a new kind of servitude which covers the surface of society with a network of complicated rules, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate. It does not tyrannize but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”

Alexis de Tocqueville, like another French classical liberal (now called conservatives not to be confused with today’s progressive liberals) Frederick Bastiat saw the dangers of the nanny state and how citizens would be willing to trade freedom for government handouts. It was Bastiat who said in his 1850 book, The Law, stated:

“…But, generally, the law is made by one man or one class of men. And since law cannot operate without the sanction and support of a dominating force, this force must be entrusted to those who make the laws.

This fact, combined with the fatal tendency that exists in the heart of man to satisfy his wants with the least possible effort, explains the almost universal perversion of the law. Thus it is easy to understand how law, instead of checking injustice, becomes the invincible weapon of injustice. It is easy to understand why the law is used by the legislator to destroy in varying degrees among the rest of the people, their personal independence by slavery, their liberty by oppression, and their property by plunder. This is done for the benefit of the person who makes the law, and in proportion to the power that he holds.”

Bastiat recognized that the greatest single threat to liberty is government. Notice the clarity he employs to help us identify and understand evil government acts such as legalized plunder. Bastiat says, “See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.” With such an accurate description of legalized plunder, we cannot deny the conclusion that most government activities, including ours, are legalized plunder, or for the sake of modernity, legalized theft.

If Bastiat or de Tocqueville were alive today, they would be disappointed with our failure to keep the law within its proper domain. Over the course of a century and a half, we have created more than 50,000 laws. Most of them permit the state to initiate violence against those who have not initiated violence against others.

Bastiat explains the call for laws that restrict peaceable, voluntary exchange and punish the desire to be left alone by saying that socialists want to play God. Socialists look upon people as raw material to be formed into social combinations. To them— the elite—“the relationship between persons and the legislator appears to be the same as the relationship between the clay and the potter.” And for people who have this vision, Bastiat displays the only anger I find in The Law when he lashes out at do-gooders and would-be rulers of mankind, “Ah, you miserable creatures! You who think that you are so great! You who judge humanity to be so small! You who wish to reform everything! Why don’t you reform yourselves? That task would be sufficient enough.”

In essence we have created a state where there exists a permanent recipient class — a class that is dependent on government for its sustenance. This is today’s definition of equality.

Last week, Jonah Goldberg wondered why Republicans are doing so well at the local and state level but striking out at the federal level of politics. His answer to the question is simple: state and local government is about nuts and bolts; the federal government is all about religion. Goldberg stated in his Townhall column:

“Our presidents, Republican and Democrat alike, talk about their "visions" for America, as if being a president requires you to impose some quasi-religious vision on the country.

But the Democrats are simply better at talking about government in spiritual terms. Indeed, such testifying is Obama's one indisputable gift. They talk about the federal government doing things we'd want God to do if God dabbled in public policy.”

Here is reason good enough for President Jefferson to call for a "wall of separation" between church and state: to keep the vision thing a safe distance away from government and its enforcement officers. Because, as I like to say, government is force, and it is always a good idea to keep that in mind as soon as someone starts talking about "the children", “investment” or "inequality."

Yes, inequality: that's how liberals are justifying their expansion of government these days. That's what President Obama was talking about in his Osawatomie speech in December 2011,

In a recent Pew Research Organization poll the top four issues for Hispanic voters were; the economy (jobs), health care, the deficit, and foreign policy. The Democrats did a better job of convincing these voters that they would give them more than Romney — it was the traditional Democrat offerings of more stuff from government. Immigration was very low on the list and gun control was not even mentioned. (See: Another Round of Immigration Reform)

Today it is estimated that 47% of Americans are living off of some sort of federal, state, or local subsistence programs. These programs include:

• 99 weeks unemployment insurance
• Food stamps (SNAP). Ten years ago 19.5 million Americans were on food stamps, today the number exceeds 47 million which is equivalent to 15% of the population.
• Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC)
• Earned Income Tax Credits (EITC)
• Medicaid — a program that is jointly funded by the state and federal government.
• Aid to dependent children (TANF)
• Farm subsidies
• Stimulus programs, also known as corporate welfare
• Government workers and teachers pensions and health care plans creating trillions of dollars in unfunded liability for future taxpayers.
• Subsidized college loans
• School breakfast and lunch programs

This list could go on and on, but these are just a few of the more costly forms of legal plunder. Also note that not one of these programs is in the scope of the federal government as that scope is defined by the enumerated powers listed in Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution.

In Entitlement America, the head of a household of four making minimum wage has more disposable income than a family making $60,000 a year According to Wyatt Emerich as shown on Zero Hedge. Click here for the chart that tells a sad tale of plunder:

Emerich analyzes disposable income and economic benefits among several key income classes and comes to the stunning (and verifiable) conclusion that "a one-parent family of three making $14,500 a year (minimum wage) has more disposable income than a family making $60,000 a year." And that excludes benefits from Supplemental Security Income disability checks. America is now a country which punishes those middle-class people who not only try to work hard, but avoid scamming the system. Not surprisingly, it is not only the richest and most audacious thieves that prosper - it is also the penny scammers at the very bottom of the economic ladder that rip off the middle class each and every day, courtesy of the world's most generous entitlement system.

As Bastiat stated:

“Man can live and satisfy his wants only by ceaseless labor; by the ceaseless application of his faculties to natural resources. This process is the origin of property.

But it is also true that a man may live and satisfy his wants by seizing and consuming the products of the labor of others. This process is the origin of plunder. Now since man is naturally inclined to avoid pain—and since labor is pain in itself—it follows that men will resort to plunder whenever plunder is easier than work. History shows this quite clearly. And under these conditions, neither religion nor morality can stop it.”

Right now, the liberals are all agreed that "inequality" requires more government. In ten years, they will come up with something else.

What If Frederick Douglass Were Alive today?

“Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.” — Frederick Douglass

If Frederick Douglass walked today's ghettos, he would witness a new-age style of slavery, plantations without the lash and chains. He would soon be outraged that government overseers are perpetuating generations of dependency through policies designed to capture the votes of the ignorant. Of the people he would ask, "What have you done with your freedom? Where is your dignity and self-respect?"

Frederick Douglass was born about 1818 on a Maryland plantation. Following common practice, he was taken from his mother to be raised with a brood of other children until he was old enough to work. He did not know his father. At the age of eight or nine, his master sent him to work for the Auld family in the city of Baltimore. Hugh Auld was a shipbuilder.

Douglass served as a houseboy to mistress Sofia and as a caretaker of their little son Tommy. Sophia had had no experience with slaves. She was a kindhearted and pious young woman, who treated Douglass with the same gentleness that she showed her own son. Her kindness shocked Douglass: "I had been treated as a pig on the plantation; I was treated as a child now."

While master Auld was working, Sophia read aloud to the boys from the Bible. The sound of her reading sparked Douglass' curiosity as to the "mystery of reading" that he said "roused in me the desire to learn." When he asked if she would teach him to read, she introduced him to Noah Webster's textbook, The American Spelling Book, a popular "blue-back speller" that sold an amazing 122 million copies in its lifetime only the Bible and McGuffey's Readers sold more copies. Douglass quickly mastered the alphabet, and was spelling three- and four-letter words when his education came to an abrupt halt.

When master Auld discovered that Sophia had been teaching Douglass to read, he rebuked her because educating slaves was unlawful and unsafe. Douglass heard Auld say, "he should know nothing but the will of his master, and learn to obey it." "If you learn him now to read, he'll want to know how to write; and, this accomplished, he'll be running away with himself."

Those words pierced Douglass' soul: "Very well," thought I; "knowledge unfits a child to be a slave and from that moment I understood the direct pathway from slavery to freedom." Douglass became more resolute in seeking intelligence. He would teach himself to read and write, and then he would have the tools to escape bondage.

During his remaining seven years with the Aulds, Douglass surreptitiously accessed Tommy's discarded speller and copybooks. Where space permitted in the copybooks, Douglass mirrored Tommy's writing. On other occasions, Douglass used the top of a flour barrel on which to copy text from the Bible and a book of hymns that he had smuggled away.

Douglass also relied upon the help of sympathetic white boys:

“I used to carry, almost constantly, a copy of Webster's spelling book in my pocket; and, when sent on errands, or when playtime was allowed me, I would step, with my young friends, aside, and take a lesson in spelling. I generally paid my tuition fee to the boys, with bread, which I also carried in my pocket. For a single biscuit, any of my hungry little comrades would give me a lesson more valuable to me than bread.”

By the age of 13, Douglass was able to read well enough that he could follow current events in the newspaper, which is how he learned about the abolition movement and the Free States.

On one occasion, Douglass overheard some boys talking about The Columbian Orator, an anthology of famous speeches. Somehow he managed to save 50 cents, and bought the book for his secret library. The Columbian Orator increased Douglass' vocabulary and, most importantly, taught him how to express his thoughts.

“The reading of these speeches added much to my limited stock of language, and enabled me to give tongue to many interesting thoughts, which had frequently flashed through my soul, and died away for want of utterance. The mighty power and heart-searching directness of truth, penetrating even the heart of a slaveholder, compelling him to yield up his earthly interests to the claims of eternal justice, were finely illustrated in the dialogue, just referred to; and from the speeches of Sheridan, I got a bold and powerful denunciation of oppression, and a most brilliant vindication of the rights of man. Here was, indeed, a noble acquisition. If I ever wavered under the consideration, that the Almighty,...

I saw through the attempt to keep me in ignorance; I saw that slaveholders would have gladly made me believe that they were merely acting under the authority of God, in making a slave of me. The feeding and clothing of me, could not atone for taking my liberty from me.” (Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom: Part I -- Life as a Slave)

Aged 20, Frederick Douglass ran away to the free state of Massachusetts. There were many hardships to overcome in the years ahead, but he made the most of his freedom. Initially he joined the abolitionist movement. In time Douglass broke with them because they merely wanted to change hearts, whereas Douglass wanted to alter slavery laws. He gave heartrending speeches in the free states, as well as in England and Ireland. He founded The North Star, an antislavery newspaper. Douglass wrote three autobiographies, each book reanalyzing the chapters of his life and recording his evolving views of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. At first he saw no place for the black man in the founding documents, but in time he reversed his arguments.

Douglass became so renowned in the campaign to emancipate slaves that Republican President, Abraham Lincoln, invited him to the White House as an adviser. They developed a close friendship, and eventually Douglas embraced Lincoln's republicanism: "I am a Republican, a black, dyed in the wool Republican, and I never intend to belong to any other party than the party of freedom and progress." When Lincoln was assassinated, Douglass mourned saying, "No people or class of people in this country, have better reason for lamenting the death of Abraham Lincoln, than have the colored people." When asked what was Lincoln to the colored people, Douglass described all of Lincoln's predecessors as "facile and servile instruments of the slave power,[sic] Abraham Lincoln, while unsurpassed in his devotion, to the welfare of the white race, was also in a sense hitherto without example, emphatically, the black man's President.

Imagine this man, Frederick Douglass, walking the slums of Chicago or Detroit, and witnessing the desolation of its peoples. In My Bondage and My Freedom, Douglass laments that "Slavery does away with fathers, as it does with families." To beget more wealth, women were raped by their masters who, without remorse, sold their kin. Destruction of the family continues today, and has been expanded to the whole people, regardless of their origins. State overseers reward single women with welfare benefits for every child they bear, so long as no father is in the home. Douglass warned, "Make a man a slave, and you rob him of moral responsibility. Freedom of choice is the essence of all accountability."

In the old days, slave babies were separated from their mothers shortly after birth and placed in the care of others until they were old enough to be sold or rented out. Asking questions about parentage was evidence of impudent curiosity that resulted in lashings. Today, children face a different hazard. Women with unwanted pregnancies can abort their babies, and overseers pay the clinic. Planned Parenthood sucks the babies from their mother's wombs, and dumps their bodies into the trash. Those babies will never show impudent curiosity.

In the nineteenth century slaves slept on the floor without blankets in unheated hovels. Rising at dawn, they worked until dark. They were expected to survive on meager rations, and nurse their own wounds. Today's slaves live in cookie-cutter government housing. They receive food stamps, health benefits, and free cell phones. Even if jobs were available, they are not required to work.

The abstract of a report by the Heritage Foundation states:

“Work requirements formed the foundation of the welfare reform law of 1996. However, in July, the Obama Administration issued a directive declaring that states no longer need comply with the law’s work standards. Contrary to media reports, the Obama Administration is not merely “tweaking” the law’s workfare system. Rather, HHS explicitly asserts that it will lower the number of recipients who are required to work or, even worse, allow states to bypass the law’s work requirements entirely. The Administration is turning welfare reform on its head by jettisoning the legislative goal of reducing welfare caseloads. Under the Administration’s new welfare performance standard, the pre-reform welfare system is judged a rousing success and the 1996 welfare reform is a failure.”

Obesity is a growing problem. Bored youths kill each other for trivial reasons. A December 10, 2012 report of shooting in Chicago, Obama’s home town and city for years run by Democrats, CBS News stated:

“Over the weekend, 14 people were shot. Two were killed. So far this year, there have been more than 2,364 shootings and 487 homicides.”

If you look at other Democrat run cities like Detroit, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Los Angeles the number of gang related shootings run into the thousands. While Democrats urge more gun control for law abiding citizens they refuse to look at their years of failed policies of welfare, lousy public schools, and pandering to the Black and Hispanic population — policies that have spawned these killings.

In Douglass' era, slaves did not know the days of the month or the months of the year, only seasonal events like planting and harvesting times. Ignorance was enforced when Democrats passed laws that forbade educating slaves. Education is a right for everyone now, but educators have thrown away the effective alphabet and phonics method used in the blue-back speller and replaced it with whole language instruction, a technique that impedes learning. Over time, the result has been a population of poorly educated people, easily fooled into believing that the government is a benevolent caretaker (so long as it is run by Democrat overseers.)

To see the trailer for the Runaway Slave Movie please Click Here. This video will show how liberal progressive policies have destroyed the Black family, culture, and future and kept them slaves on the government plantation.

If, by magic, Douglass could meet the inhabitants of the ghettos, what might he say to them? He would remind them that Knowledge is Power, and much more importantly, Knowledge is Freedom. He would encourage them to take practical steps — to master reading and writing by every means possible; to ask for help from educated people; to listen to educated speakers. And he will suggest that something old should be new again; reprint Webster's blue-back speller and The Columbian Orator.

From the Great Society to the Fair Society

“We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.” — Lyndon Johnson, Commencement Address at Howard University, June 4, 1965.

On November 22, 1963 in Dallas, Texas two rifle shots from a Marxist assassin ended the life of President John F. Kennedy and ended what was known as the era of Camelot and began the “Great Society.”

On that clear November day riding two cars behind Kennedy’s open top Lincoln was the Vice President of the United States, Lyndon Baines Johnson. Johnson, once the majority leader of the Senate and a powerful Senator from the Lone Star state, was never supposed to be Vice President. In 1960 he had run a very contentious primary campaign against the Kennedy machine and he had no love for the Massachusetts Senator. But once Kennedy realized he had the nomination in hand he needed Texas’ 24 Electoral Votes to win the presidency. For this reason Kennedy picked Johnson as his running mate and won the election by 112,827 votes which gave him a 303 to 219 advantage in the Electoral College over his opponent Richard Nixon.

Once Kennedy was inaugurated He, his brother Robert, and his White House brain trust completely ignored Johnson. In fact Robert, the Attorney General, had a deep mistrust and hatred for LBJ. Johnson was excluded from many Cabinet meetings and rarely met with President Kennedy. He was considered a ghost in the White House. This once powerful Majority Leader and skilled legislator was relegated to making “good will” trips places like Lebanon where he passed out LBJ pins and Zippo lighters engraved with his name and the seal of the Vice President.

In three seconds on November 22, 1963 at 12:30 pm, due to a 6.5×52mm Mannlicher-Carcano rifle in the hands of Lee Harvey Oswald, the Presidency of John F. Kennedy came to an abrupt end and Lyndon Johnson was the President of the United States. Hence, the beginnings of the “Great Society.”

Before continuing I cannot resist pointing out a few parallels between the assassination of President Kennedy and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln some 98 years earlier on April 14, 1865:

Lincoln was first elected in 1860, Kennedy in 1960.

• Both were assassinated on a Friday.
• Both were assassinated in the presence of their wives.
• Their successors were both southerners named Johnson who had served in the Senate.
• Andrew Johnson was born in 1808, Lyndon Johnson was born in 1908.
• Lincoln was elected to Congress in 1846 while Kennedy to the House in 1946.
• Both men suffered the death of children while in office.
• The assassin Booth shot inside a theater and fled into a storage facility, while the assassin Oswald shot from a storage facility and fled into a theater.

For the remainder of 1963 Johnson spent most of his time and effort on consolidating his power and purging the White House of the Kennedy Brain Trust. In 1964 he ran for election to the presidency and won an overwhelming victory over his Republican opponent Barry Goldwater, the conservative senator from Arizona winning 61% of the popular vote and 486 Electoral Votes to Goldwater’s 52. Now it was Johnson’s time to expand and enhance the social policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal.”

Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society is the logical extension of Progressive political thought and FDR’s New Deal. While the Founders held that the task of good government is to secure its citizens’ natural rights, LBJ argued that government must eradicate all external constraints—legal, economic, educational, and environmental—which hamper the “spiritual fulfillment” of its citizens. The extensive regulations and programs of the Great Society are thus meant to guarantee not only the right to pursue happiness but also the full achievement of it.

Johnson anchored his Great Society program in the Progressive understanding of freedom: Freedom in its fullest sense encompasses more than the formal or legal right to do a thing; freedom entails the ability to effect that thing. Thus the central conceptual element of the Great Society—the purpose of both civil rights and the War on Poverty—is the elimination of any economic, legal, or social hindrances to the achievement of excellence and the “fulfillment of the human spirit.”

The Founders believed that the causes of necessity are rooted in human nature itself, and that a government that seeks to eradicate necessity quickly becomes tyrannical. By contrast, LBJ held that specific government policies and programs, initiated and guided by bureaucratic experts and masterminds, could overcome the unhappiness and discontent brought about especially by racial injustice and poverty.

Consequently, his Great Society legislation focuses on cities (developing community and aesthetically pleasing spaces), the countryside and the environment at large (engaging in conservation efforts to make beauty accessible to all), and education (funding not only programs and initiatives for all levels of schooling but also educational broadcasting for the public at large).

Declaring that “the Great Society is a place where the City of Man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce, but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community,” LBJ argued for a radically new purpose for the federal government: It would go beyond securing natural rights and seek the fulfillment of the longings of the human soul.”

Johnson began his push for the Great Society when he gave a speech at the University of Michigan on May 22, 1964 when he stated:

“I have come today from the turmoil of your Capital to the tranquility of your campus to speak about the future of your country.

The purpose of protecting the life of our Nation and preserving the liberty of our citizens is to pursue the happiness of our people. Our success in that pursuit is the test of our success as a Nation.

For a century we labored to settle and to subdue a continent. For half a century we called upon unbounded invention and untiring industry to create an order of plenty for all of our people.

The challenge of the next half century is whether we have the wisdom to use that wealth to enrich and elevate our national life, and to advance the quality of our American civilization.

Your imagination, your initiative, and your indignation will determine whether we build a society where progress is the servant of our needs, or a society where old values and new visions are buried under unbridled growth. For in your time we have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the Great Society.

The Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we are totally committed in our time. But that is just the beginning.

The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents. It is a place where leisure is a welcome chance to build and reflect, not a feared cause of boredom and restlessness. It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community.

It is a place where man can renew contact with nature. It is a place which honors creation for its own sake and for what it adds to the understanding of the race. It is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods. But most of all, the Great Society is not a safe harbor, a resting place, a final objective, a finished work. It is a challenge constantly renewed, beckoning us toward a destiny where the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our labor.

So I want to talk to you today about three places where we begin to build the Great Society—in our cities, in our countryside, and in our classrooms.”

This is considered by historians as the beginning of the use of the term “Great Society” and the first time Johnson laid out the three pillars of that society; Civil Rights, Beauty in the cities, and Education.

When he accepted the Democratic Party’s nomination for president on August 27, 1964 Johnson proclaimed:

“So let us join together in giving every American the fullest life which he can hope for. For the ultimate test of our civilization, the ultimate test of our faithfulness to our past, is not in our goods and is not in our guns. It is in the quality—the quality of our people’s lives and in the men and women that we produce. This goal can be ours. We have the resources; we have the knowledge. But tonight we must seek the courage.”

….

We are in the midst of the largest and the longest period of peacetime prosperity in our history.

And almost every American listening to us tonight has seen the results in his own life.

But prosperity for most has not brought prosperity to all. And those who have received the bounty of this land—who sit tonight secure in affluence and safe in power-must not now turn from the needs of their neighbors.

Our party and our Nation will continue to extend the hand of compassion and the hand of affection and love to the old and the sick and the hungry. For who among us dares to betray the command: “Thou shalt open thine hand—unto thy brother, to thy poor, and to thy needy, in thy land.”

The needs that we seek to fill, the hopes that we seek to realize, are not our needs, our hopes alone.

They are the needs and hopes of most of the people.

Most Americans want medical care for older citizens. And so do I.

Most Americans want fair and stable prices and decent incomes for our farmers. And so do I.

Most Americans want a decent home in a decent neighborhood for all. And so do I.

Most Americans want an education for every child to the limit of his ability. And so do I.

Most Americans want a job for every man who wants to work. And so do I.

Most Americans want victory in our war against poverty. And so do I.

Most Americans want continually expanding and growing prosperity. And so do I.

These are your goals. These are our goals. These are the goals and will be the achievements of the Democratic Party. These are the goals of this great, rich Nation. These are the goals toward which I will lead, if the American people choose to follow.”

….

Our problems are many and are great. But our opportunities are even greater.

And let me make this clear. I ask the American people for a mandate—not to preside over a finished program—not just to keep things going, I ask the American people for a mandate to begin.

This Nation—this generation—in this hour, has man’s first chance to build the Great Society—a place where the meaning of man’s life matches the marvels of man’s labor.

We seek a nation where every man can find reward in work and satisfaction in the use of his talents.

We seek a nation where every man can seek knowledge, and touch beauty, and rejoice in the closeness of family and community.

We seek a nation where every man can, in the words of our oldest promise, follow the pursuit of happiness—not just security-but achievements and excellence and fulfillment of the spirit.

So let us join together in this great task.

Will you join me tonight in rebuilding our cities to make them a decent place for our children to live in?

Will you join me tonight in starting a program that will protect the beauty of our land and the air that we breathe ?

Won’t you join me tonight in starting a program that will give every child education of the highest quality that he can take?

So let us join together in giving every American the fullest life which he can hope for. For the ultimate test of our civilization, the ultimate test of our faithfulness to our past, is not in our goods and is not in our guns. It is in the quality—the quality of our people’s lives and in the men and women that we produce.

This goal can be ours. We have the resources; we have the knowledge. But tonight we must seek the courage.

Because tonight the contest is the same that we have faced at every turning point in history.

It is not between liberals and conservatives, it is not between party and party, or platform and platform. It is between courage and timidity. It is between those who have vision and those who see what can be, and those who want only to maintain the status quo. It is between those who welcome the future and those who turn away from its promises.

This is the true cause of freedom. The man who is hungry, who cannot find work or educate his children, who is bowed by want—that man is not fully free.”

After his reelection in 1964 Johnson began detailing his plans for his great society during the commencement address at Howard University on June 4, 1965 where he said:

“The voting rights bill will be the latest, and among the most important, in a long series of victories. But this victory—as Winston Churchill said of another triumph for freedom—"is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."

That beginning is freedom; and the barriers to that freedom are tumbling down. Freedom is the right to share, share fully and equally, in American society—to vote, to hold a job, to enter a public place, to go to school. It is the right to be treated in every part of our national life as a person equal in dignity and promise to all others.

But freedom is not enough. You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please.

You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, "you are free to compete with all the others," and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.

Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates.

This is the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.

For the task is to give 20 million Negroes the same chance as every other American to learn and grow, to work and share in society, to develop their abilities—physical, mental and spiritual, and to pursue their individual happiness.

To this end equal opportunity is essential, but not enough, not enough. Men and women of all races are born with the same range of abilities. But ability is not just the product of birth. Ability is stretched or stunted by the family that you live with, and the neighborhood you live in—by the school you go to and the poverty or the richness of your surroundings. It is the product of a hundred unseen forces playing upon the little infant, the child, and finally the man.”

In this speech Johnson provided the birth certificate for affirmative action and laws pertaining to “diversity” where the central government would guarantee not just the rights of equality, but the results of equality. This is program that has failed for the past 47 years and has created much mischief in all aspects of lives, but mainly education and hiring. The progressives were changing the City of God into the City of Man where rights and equality no longer came from Nature’s God, but from the government.

On January 13, 1965 Lyndon Johnson, in a special message to Congress laid out his plans for Full Educational Responsibility:

“To the Congress of the United States:

In 1787, the Continental Congress declared in the Northwest Ordinance: "schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged."

America is strong and prosperous and free because for one hundred and seventy-eight years we have honored that commitment. In the United States today:

--One-quarter of all Americans are in the nation's classrooms.

--High school attendance has grown 19-fold since the turn of the century--6 times as fast as the population.

--College enrollment has advanced 80-fold. Americans today support a fourth of the world's institutions of higher learning and a third of its professors and college students.

In the life of the individual, education is always an unfinished task.

And in the life of this nation, the advancement of education is a continuing challenge.

There is a darker side to education in America:

--One student out of every three now in the fifth grade will drop out before finishing high school--if the present rate continues.

--Almost a million young people will continue to quit school each year--if our schools fail to stimulate their desire to learn.

--Over one hundred thousand of our brightest high school graduates each year will not go to college--and many others will leave college--if the opportunity for higher education is not expanded.

The cost of this neglect runs high--both for the youth and the nation.

--Unemployment of young people with an eighth grade education or less is four times the national average.

--Jobs filled by high school graduates rose by 40% in the last ten years. Jobs for those with less schooling decreased by nearly 10%.

We can measure the cost in even starker terms. We now spend about $450 a year per child in our public schools. But we spend $1,800 a year to keep a delinquent youth in a detention home, $2,500 a year for a family on relief, $3,500 a year for a criminal in state prison.

The growing numbers of young people reaching school age demand that we move swiftly even to stand still.

--Attendance in elementary and secondary schools will increase by 4 million in the next five years. 400,000 new classrooms will be needed to meet this growth. But almost 1/2 million of the nation's existing classrooms are already more than 30 years old.

--The post-World War II boom in babies has now reached college age. And by 1970, our colleges must be prepared to add 50% more enrollment to their presently overcrowded facilities.

In the past, Congress has supported an increasing commitment to education in America. Last year, I signed historic measures passed by the Eighty-eighth Congress to provide:

--facilities badly needed by universities, colleges and community colleges;

--major new resources for vocational training;

--more loans and fellowships for students enrolled in higher education;

--enlarged and improved training for physicians, dentists and nurses.

I propose that the Eighty-ninth Congress join me in extending the commitment still further. I propose that we declare a national goal of Full Educational Opportunity.

Every child must be encouraged to get as much education as he has the ability to take.

We want this not only for his sake--but for the nation's sake.”

In 47 years since the enactment of numerous laws, regulations, and taxes by the federal government to provide this so-called Full Educational Opportunity test scores have dropped, graduation rates in the inner cities have declined, the cost of K-12 and college has more than tripled and we are bombarded with a constant barrage of more money from federal, state, and local governments for education. And all of this at the federal level without a warrant in the Constitution for doing so.

On February 8, 1965 in a special message to Congress gave his remarks on Conservation and Restoration of Natural Beauty. In his address Johnson laid out a program for spending millions of federal dollars on conservation and beautification projects for cities, highways, and rural America:

“THE CITIES Thomas Jefferson wrote that communities "should be planned with an eye to the effect made upon the human spirit by being continually surrounded with a maximum of beauty."

We have often sadly neglected this advice in the modern American city. Yet this is where most of our people live. It is where the character of our young is formed. It is where American civilization will be increasingly concentrated in years to come.

Such a challenge will not be met with a few more parks or playgrounds. It requires attention to the architecture of building, the structure of our roads, preservation of historical buildings and monuments, careful planning of new suburbs. A concern for the enhancement of beauty must infuse every aspect of the growth and development of metropolitan areas. It must be a principal responsibility of local government, supported by active and concerned citizens.

Federal assistance can be a valuable stimulus and help to such local efforts.

I have recommended a community extension program which will bring the resources of the university to focus on problems of the community just as they have long been concerned with our rural areas. Among other things, this program will help provide training and technical assistance to aid in making our communities more attractive and vital. In addition, under the Housing Act of 1964, grants will be made to States for training of local governmental employees needed for community development. I am recommending a 1965 supplemental appropriation to implement this program.

We now have two programs which can be of special help in creating areas of recreation and beauty for our metropolitan area population: the Open Space Land Program, and the Land and Water Conservation Fund.

I have already proposed full funding of the Land and Water Conservation Fund, and directed the Secretary of the Interior to give priority attention to serving the needs of our growing urban population.

The primary purpose of the Open Space Program has been to help acquire and assure open spaces in urban areas. I propose a series of new matching grants for improving the natural beauty of urban open space.

The Open Space Program should be adequately financed, and broadened by permitting grants to be made to help city governments acquire and clear areas to create small parks, squares, pedestrian malls and playgrounds.

In addition I will request authority in this program for a matching program to cities for landscaping, installation of outdoor lights and benches, creating attractive cityscapes along roads and in business areas, and for other beautification purposes.

Our city parks have not, in many cases, realized their full potential as sources of pleasure and play. I recommend on a matching basis a series of federal demonstration projects in city parks to use the best thought and action to show how the appearance of these parks can better serve the people of our towns and metropolitan areas.

All of these programs should be operated on the same matching formula to avoid unnecessary competition among programs and increase the possibility of cooperative effort. I will propose such a standard formula.

In a future message on the cities I will recommend other changes in our housing programs designed to strengthen the sense of community of which natural beauty is an important component.

In almost every part of the country citizens are rallying to save landmarks of beauty and history. The government must also do its share to assist these local efforts which have an important national purpose. We will encourage and support the National Trust for Historic Preservation in the United States, chartered by Congress in 1949- I shall propose legislation to authorize supplementary grants to help local authorities acquire, develop and manage private properties for such purposes.”

Programs that were eventually instituted under this proposal were the Community Action Program (community organizing), Model Cities Project, and Urban and Suburban Planning. One of the first cities to fall under the Model Cities Project was Detroit. After 47 years and spending billions of taxpayer dollars Detroit is in worse shape that it was in 1965. In the words of once presidential candidate Herman Caine, “how’s that working out for you.”

Those who believed in and supported the Great Society believed that they could bring the City of God down to earth and we could run it by centralized government manned by trained experts and masterminds. In the ensuing years Johnson’s Great Society has not changed very much with the exception of planning miles of Bluebonnet wildflowers along the Texas highways. Our cities are worse off, our K-12 education system is broken, and we are living with regulations such as the type of light bulb we can but, the toilet we can uses, and different blends of gasoline that all function as tax increases on we the people.

After spending trillions of dollars on Great Society programs and hiring millions of federal, state and local civil servant bureaucrats and masterminds, who will be with us for a long time to come, the Great Society is an abject failure.

Now the progressives, under the leadership of Barack Obama, are disdain to use the Great Society. Now they have coined a new term for the same old failed government policies and it’s called “The Fair Society.” Rather than propose new programs they are doubling down on the old failed ones with the additional caveat of promoting class warfare.