The Greatest Threat to Our National Security

"If a nation expects to be ignorant — and free — in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." —Thomas Jefferson, letter to Colonel Charles Yancey, 1816

With so much media coverage being given to the swap of five top ranking Taliban terrorist leaders for an army deserter there has not been much national coverage or dialogue on our greatest threat to our culture, economy, and national security. That threat is the illegal and uncontrolled immigration from south of our border.

Last year, according to ICE figures some 75,000 illegals came over the border and were dumped into our state. The estimates for this year surpasses 200,000 to 300,000 and possibly more. Most of these illegals are children from Central America. They are being dumped on the states of Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas without permission of the governments of those states. It will be up to the us taxpayers to pay for these illegals.

If a child is lost in a shopping center he or she is not evicted and sent out into the greater population. They are returned to their parents or family. Not the case with these illegal immigrant children. They are warehoused and given food, clothing, medical attention, and education. They are dumped into overburdened public school systems where their education will cost more than that of legal citizens due to their lack of elementary education and inability to speak English.

Recently, the Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson made Border Patrol “a level-four condition of readiness” because of the number of children crossing the border alone. According to The New York Times, the number of unaccompanied children coming into the United States from as far away as Honduras has risen from 4,000 youths in 2011 to 21,000 in 2013. The number of children that already crossed the border exceeded the projected 60,000 Border Patrol estimated for the whole year. “We have to discourage parents from sending or sending for their children to cross the Southwest border because of the risks involved,” Johnson said. “A South Texas processing center is no place for a child.” When the federal government’s policies reward the illegal immigration of children, it gives a whole new meaning to the phrase “Nanny State.

The spike of unaccompanied children crossing the border is cracking the defenses along the border to the breaking point. According to The Washington Times, the Border Patrol has diverted much of its energy to dealing with the waves of youth, leaving drug smugglers and their ilk to operate more freely. A Border Patrol memo obtained by the Times found, “The large quantity of DHS interdiction, intelligence, investigation, processing, detention and removal resources currently being dedicated to address [Unaccompanied Alien Children] is compromising DHS capabilities to address other trans-border criminal areas, such as human smuggling and trafficking and illicit drug, weapons, commercial and financial operations.” The memo continued to say the diversion of resources will hamstring law enforcement immediately and possibly well into the future. This is what happens when Obama creates a culture of open, unquestioning acceptance towards illegal immigration.

According to a June 3rd report by McAllen, Texas’ Channel 5 ABC News illegal immigrants reports that in Central America they are encouraged to trek north:

“Central Americans say news reports in their countries are encouraging them to make the journey north to the United States.

A mother and child told CHANNEL 5 NEWS that the message being disseminated in their country is, "go to America with your child, you won't be turned away."

The woman, Nora Griselda Bercian Diaz, from Guatemala, said she endured threats from the Zetas and extortion from corrupt Mexican police. She eventually crossed the Rio Grande with her 6-year-old Delmi Griselda Paul Bercian by her side.

The woman said she wants a U.S. education for her daughter.

"I want to study," said the girl who hopes to one day become a doctor.

A CHANNEL 5 NEWS crew met the mother and daughter three hours after they crossed the border illegally. They were lost and searching for Border Patrol agents.

"I was planning to go to McAllen then call a friend for her to send me money on the bus," Bercian Diaz said.

Bercian Diaz said she has no family in the United States. Her hope of staying here relies on her little girl. She said the message in her country is that America's borders are open to all families.

News reports in Guatemala say mothers and small children are getting bus tickets, Bercian Diaz said.

"I said, ‘I need to act right now, because this will end and my girl won't have a future,'" Bercian Diaz said.

Bercian Diaz said she has a haunting past. She was deported a year ago. Her fear is that the deportation will break up her family.

"I'm afraid," the woman said crying.

"I'm afraid of being sent back to my country. I don't have any family in the United States, I just have friends," she said.

Bercian Diaz worked in California restaurants until she got caught. She would send money back to help her daughter.

The signs of malnourishment are evident on the young girl.

"I brought her here because I know this is a better future for her," Bercian Diaz said.

Bercian Diaz said they endured harassment in Tampico. She said members of the Zetas drug cartel tried to kidnap them.

"They chased us to kidnap us to request for ransom," Bercian Diaz said.

She said they barely escaped.

Bercian Diaz said they found corruption in the Mexican government.

"They were asking for 500 pesos, 600 pesos. The federals took that money from us," she said.

She said the Mexican federal police and immigration officers asked for money to "turn the other way."

"The immigration officers took 1,500 pesos," Bercian Diaz said.

She said the threat of rape and kidnapping haunted them every day.

"We were hiding with people in small houses on our way. They were trying to hide from the federal police. I was afraid for my little girl. They can do whatever to me, but not to my little girl," Bercian Diaz said.

The young girl wept as they waited for Border Patrol agents.

"I'm afraid of being separated," the girl said.

"She doesn't want to be away from me," Bercian Diaz said.

Bercian Diaz said the fear of cartels and corruption was replaced by fear of what's to come.

Agents eventually arrived and ushered the mother and daughter into a van. The agents didn't have time to turn around before another group came walking up the same road.”

This is similar to the story these illegals tell over and over again. They are escaping the threats of the drug cartels. It is no doubt a story they have been told to tell by the smugglers. It is a story relating to political refuge.

About 700 unaccompanied minors mostly from Central America were sleeping on plastic boards at a Border Patrol warehouse in Nogales, Arizona, this weekend, the vast majority flown from South Texas. It is the latest illustration of how a wave of immigrants from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala has overwhelmed U.S. border authorities. President Barack Obama called the surge a crisis last week and appointed the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to lead the government’s response. Here are some questions and answers according to a June 9th report by CBS Houston:

WHAT IS THE SCOPE OF THE PROBLEM?

Illegal border crossings soared for several years in South Texas, which recently surpassed Arizona as the busiest corridor. The Border Patrol’s Rio Grande Valley sector made 148,017 arrests from Oct. 1 to May 17, far higher than the 62,876 caught in Tucson, Arizona, which is the second-busiest crossing point.

The dramatic shift is taxing U.S. authorities because Hondurans, Salvadorans and Guatemalans make up about 75 percent of those caught in South Texas, the traditional entry point for Central Americans. For decades, the vast majority of people who crossed the border illegally were from neighboring Mexico and could be deported the same day on a short bus ride to the nearest crossing. Central Americans are sent home on U.S. government flights, a more daunting challenge.

An unusually large number of those crossing in South Texas are unaccompanied children, many seeking to join parents who are already in the U.S. illegally. Authorities arrested 47,017 unaccompanied children on the border from October through May, up 92 percent from the same period a year earlier. A draft Border Patrol memorandum estimates that number could reach 90,000 in the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, up from a previous government estimate of 60,000.

WHY NOW?

Rampant crime and poverty across Central America is a big reason. Honduras has the highest murder rate in the world, with 90.4 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, according to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime. The World Bank says nearly 60 percent of Honduras’ 8 million people live in poverty.

Some Republican lawmakers and administration critics say lax enforcement practices encourage children to make the perilous journey. They cite an opinion by U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen of Brownsville, Texas, in December that blasted authorities for releasing a Salvadoran girl to her mother, who hired a smuggler to transport her daughter and was in the country illegally.

“(The government) has simply chosen not to enforce the United States’ border security laws,” the judge wrote.

The government has released some immigrants but refused to say how many. The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency says it will make “appropriate custody determinations.”

WHAT’S BEING DONE?

The Obama administration has asked Congress for $1.4 billion to help house, feed and transport children and plans to temporarily house more than 1,000 at military bases in Ventura, California; San Antonio, Texas; and Fort Sill, Oklahoma.

Immigration officials, by policy, do not keep children in detention. They are transferred to the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement to be housed in shelters until they can be reunited with parents or guardians.

A Homeland Security official said Health and Human Services turned to the Border Patrol to house children temporarily at the Nogales warehouse starting May 31 because they were overwhelmed. About 2,000 vinyl-covered mattresses were ordered, and the official expected the population there to double to 1,400.

On Sunday, about 60 children arrived at the Nogales shelter and the same number left after they were moved to other locations, said the official, who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

Carlos de Leon, Guatemala’s vice consul in Phoenix, said portable showers arrived Friday and a contractor was brought in to serve hot meals Sunday.

“It’s not a shelter, but the conditions are getting better,” said de Leon, who visited Sunday and reported there were 280 Guatemalan children.

Tony Banegas, Honduras’ honorary consul in Phoenix, said the first toothbrushes and toothpaste were expected Monday. Children who had not bathed in days were rotating through four showers. He said there were 236 Honduran children there on Saturday, including an 8-year-old.

The government has also been flying families from South Texas to Arizona and El Paso, Texas, and releasing them at bus stations. ICE has only one detention facility for families — an 85-bed center in Pennsylvania.”

Back in the Sixties, Marxists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven came up with a great strategy for overloading and collapsing democratic welfare states, paving the way for socialist tyranny. Basically, the idea was to hit the system with a tidal wave of demands it couldn’t refuse, and couldn’t possibly fulfill. The Left would then insist that the moral argument for the system remained intact, so the only way to meet those impossible demands was to scrap every vestige of Constitutional restraint and republican self-government, instituting a totalitarian system that in theory would forcibly restructure society to promote “fairness” and give all those government dependents what they “deserve.” (In practice, of course, what you actually get is an iron-fisted dictatorship that cooks up reports to make itself look good, or simply tells the unhappy citizens to shut up and obey when things deteriorate to the point that no volume of phony reports can paper over the problems – say, when the glorious worker’s paradise of Venezuela runs out of tap water.)

Cloward and Piven were specifically interested in replacing welfare programs with a government-guaranteed annual income for everyone — an idea that still emerges from the more absurd quarters of the Progressive Left occasionally — but the basic idea of overloading the republican system and replacing it with centrally-planned tyranny can be applied in many different ways. Take a look at the humanitarian crisis on the southern border. It has since burst onto the front pages with some astonishing stories, including leaked photos of illegal alien children — many of them 12 years old and younger — “warehoused” in overcrowded facilities, where there are growing concerns about sanitation and disease. CBS News in Houston writes of unaccompanied minors sleeping on plastic boards in a Nogales, Arizona warehouse after being flown in from south Texas. According to some estimates, there are nearly a thousand children in that warehouse now.

There’s nothing complicated about what is happening here. Barack Obama invited these people to send their children to the United States as refugees. He’s already made illegal use of executive orders to gut the immigration system; he’s talking about doing it again, and the people of South and Central America can hear him just fine. There have been anecdotal reports of a message being spread throughout Central American countries, by everything from word-of-mouth gossip to news media: “Go to America with your child, you won’t be turned away.” (It will come as no surprise to learn that the Mexican government is not doing much to halt the train of amnesty-seekers headed for American soil. On the contrary, corrupt Mexican officials are trying to get a cut of the profits from the refugee-smuggling trade.)

And it’s not just the President sending those signals, since there’s a vibrant bipartisan amnesty chorus in Congress. Obama will only seize power to rewrite the laws if Congress doesn’t do it fast enough for his taste, or if he sees electoral advantage in taking matters into his own hands.

Young illegals are particularly cherished by the American ruling class, which has dubbed them “Dreamers” and frankly describes them as superior in motivation and potential to native-born young people. There is every reason for families who live in South America to think their children will be given citizenship, plus special perks (such as access to discounted college tuition rates) if they can get them to the U.S. border. The Obama Administration is even talking about providing the young illegals with attorneys. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has become involved at President Obama’s direction.

“We’re taking a historic step to strengthen our justice system and protect the rights of the most vulnerable members of society,” Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said in a statement announcing the plan.

“How we treat those in need, particularly young people who must appear in immigration proceedings — many of whom are fleeing violence, persecution, abuse or trafficking — goes to the core of who we are as a nation,” he said.

This tidal wave of illegals is not an accident, and not entirely a result of conditions in Central America (which have deteriorated lately, but were already bad enough to inspire any sane person to seek a new life elsewhere.) These people were summoned. And now that they’re here, the system is collapsing beneath their weight. In addition to the refugees flown to Arizona in the CBS News story above, the El Paso Times reports two planeloads of illegals arriving for processing. ”The vast majority of individuals transferred were family units from Central America and Mexico with children,” according to an El Paso official.

Contrary to popular mythology about President Obama being some sort of deportation hard-liner, the truth is that most of his “deportations” were actually catch-and-release scenarios played out at the border — people who were essentially repulsed rather than caught and deported. Such people were not counted as “deportations” in the past — this is about the government cooking the books to make itself look better? Well, catch-and-release only works when the illegal aliens in question come from Mexico. There’s no practical method for sending the wave of families and unaccompanied minors surging in from Central America back to their homes. They’re most likely here to stay. And even though the Obama Administration had every reason to know they were coming, the immigration system was curiously unprepared to deal with them. Cloward-Piven tactics work even better when the system is hollowed out and made ready for speedy collapse.

Does the amnesty chorus recoil from this humanitarian crisis in shame and ask, “My God, what have we done?” Do they accept this stunning proof of a point often raised by amnesty critics: lax border security and indulgence of illegal immigration causes the flood of illegal aliens — rational people who respond to incentives — to intensify? Of course not. They’re using the horror they have created as leverage to get amnesty moving even faster. Here’s GOP Majority Leader Eric Cantor talking with the White House over the weekend about making a deal, from the Daily Caller:

“I have told the president, there are some things we can work on together,” he said in the WTVR interview.

“We can work on the border security bill together, we can work on something like the kids,” he said referring to his proposal to offer some undetermined variety of amnesty to the children and youths of millions of parents who entered the country illegally.

“So far, the president has just insisted that it’s all or nothing, [it is] my way or the highway,” Cantor complained. “That’s not going to happen,” he added.

But President Barack Obama is willing to make a deal, says one White House advisor, Rev. Richard Ryscavage.

Ryscavage is a Jesuit priest, a sociology and anthropology professor at Fairfield University, the director of the university’s Center for Faith and Public Life, and a member of a new White House panel on immigration.

A compromise is “what they’re preparing for, that’s what they think is going to happen, so they’re[publicly] asking for a lot of stuff that privately they don’t think they’re going to get” in a final deal, he told The Daily Caller June 6.”

Soon we’ll have millions of new citizens placing heavy demands on our maternal government, with hundreds of thousands more streaming in every year, eager to claim the prizes that have been offered to them. The governments that mismanage the nations from which these poor souls are fleeing will feel even less pressure to make things better — they’re happy to use the United States as a dumping ground for excess population. The Cloward-Piven effect will spread inward from the border, and outward into every aspect of our centralized system. If you think the bleating about “income inequality” is bad now, wait until you hear what it sounds like after a few years of tidal-wave migration — especially if it’s combined with minimum-wage hikes that make it difficult to hire the new arrivals, and a regulatory morass that makes it hard to launch or expand businesses that might hire them. And you won’t have to wait long for ObamaCare’s planned collapse into ruin, paving the way for single-payer health care.

Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) had it exactly right, in an interview he granted to Breitbart Texas:

“We need a president who is willing to uphold the law,” Cruz said. “On issue after issue the Obama Administration has openly ignored, defied, and unilaterally tried to change the law. With respect to securing the border, the Obama Administration has handcuffed the courageous men and women who serve in Border Patrol. Morale in ICE is at an all-time low because the political operatives leading this Administration are preventing them from doing their job and upholding the law.”

He continued,

“Just a few months before the last election the president illegally and unconstitutionally granted amnesty to some 800,000 people illegally. If the president wants to change federal immigration laws, the Constitution lays out a way to do so–you go and make your case to Congress and you convince Congress to change the laws…unfortunately for President Obama, following the Constitutional structure is apparently too cumbersome. One of the consequences were seeing on the border is a humanitarian crisis that is a direct consequence of Obama’s lawlessness.”

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer responded angrily to these Cloward-Piven tactics, as the feds begin dumping illegal immigrants from Texas into her state without warning her first. When she complained, the feds said they have no intention of stopping.

According to Fox News federal officials told Brewer Friday that the practice will continue for the foreseeable future, and this weekend more than 1,000 illegal immigrant children will be “dumped” in Arizona. Adults and family units will also arrive, though Brewer was not told how many, her office said.”

What’s happening on our southern border right now is horrifying, but it’s not unexpected. The people who caused it will never feel an instant of remorse for what they’ve done. And they’ll grow increasingly less interested in what the legal citizens of the United States have to say about immigration policy.

This situation has been dropped in our laps as a done deal, a fait accompli. They’re here, they can’t be deported, there’s nothing we can do except give the amnesty chorus at least part of what it wants. Turning this into a deliberate humanitarian crisis was a political power play. Imagine the tenor of our “national conversation” on immigration if the Administration had forthrightly informed the American people that hundreds of thousands of unaccompanied minors were being flung at the border, obliging the government to spend millions preparing to receive them and it was largely happening because their parents had every reason to believe they would be well-received.

“This is a crisis of the federal government’s creation, and the fact that the border remains unsecure — now apparently intentionally — while this operation continues full-steam ahead is deplorable,” said Brewer. Exactly, Governor. Just wait until you’re told you must comply with various Washington directives in order to receive federal assistance for the man-made humanitarian crisis that just got dumped in Arizona’s lap.

The Cultural Totalitarianism Of The Left

“Society is endangered not by the great profligacy of a few, but by the laxity of morals amongst all.” — Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Totalitarianism is usually associated with an omnipresent state which enchains the individual with iron manacles of edicts, orders, and regulations. The voracious appetite of government and its eager use of coercive power make citizens into slaves whose lives are the property of those who rule rather than serve the people.

This is a grim reality in most of the world. Government power is like gravity in a black hole: it relentlessly and mindlessly accumulates more and more mass over time. Moreover, because the rationale for this power is to protect the people -- and if people were doing well, that rationale would vanish -- totalitarian government makes sure that nothing it does really makes life better. So while public education is touted as a panacea for social ills, state education administrators and politicians in their pocket resist reforms which would make schools work and insist that more money and authority over the lives of our children is the policy allowed.

There is, however, another incarnation of totalitarianism, cultural totalitarianism, which is just as dangerous as government totalitarianism. We see cultural totalitarianism all the time, although it is harder for us to grasp because we assume that those cultural totalitarians are rational participants in the marketplace of goods and services. But this is not so.

A major factor of the left’s domination of the narrative is to control the culture through the media and our education systems. This all began with John Dewey, the acknowledged father of today’s progressive education industry. Dewey, like other progressive academicians of his time were followers of the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel whose historicist and idealist account of reality revolutionized European philosophy and was an important precursor to Continental philosophy and Marxism. His ideas have been influential in education and social reform. Dewey was an important early developer of the philosophy of pragmatism and one of the founders of functional psychology — moral relevance. He was a major representative of progressive education and liberalism.

In his advocacy of democracy, Dewey considered two fundamental elements — schools and civil society — as being major topics needing attention and reconstruction to encourage experimental intelligence and plurality. Dewey asserted that complete democracy was to be obtained not just by extending voting rights but also by ensuring that there exists a fully formed public opinion, accomplished by effective communication among citizens, experts, and politicians, with the latter being accountable for the policies they adopt.

While all of this may sound very utopian Dewey’s ideas when adopted by the academy resulted more in progressive indoctrination than in critical thinking — something our institutions of higher learning are dedicated to today.

In the 1930’s Dewey’s philosophy was further advanced with the influence of the Frankfurt School a Marxist think tank dedicated to a neo-Marxist interdisciplinary social theory. The school initially consisted of dissident Marxists who believed that some of Marx's followers had come to parrot a narrow selection of Marx's ideas, usually in defense of orthodox Communist parties. Meanwhile, many of these theorists believed that traditional Marxist theory could not adequately explain the turbulent and unexpected development of capitalist societies in the twentieth century. Critical of capitalism and Soviet socialism, their writings pointed to the possibility of an alternative path to social development.

Once again many members of the academy in the United States were and still are devotees of these schools believing in a socialist-based civil society and not ion the free market system. This has been the roots of the current tyranny imposed by the statist progressive-based education pervading throughout our education system today. If challenges these educators or their cronies in the media you will be labeled a troglodyte unworthy of recognition. As the great conservative writer William F. Buckley, Jr. once proclaimed:

“Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.”

Two recent examples of this are from a university and a middle school. The example from the university is from a professor at the prestigious University of Southern California where a professor boldly indoctrinates his class on the evils of Conservatism and Republicans.

Click here to view the video

This is just one example of millions where the elite masterminds of academia indoctrinate the young minds paying thousands of dollars for a university education that in many cases will prove virtually worthless and not allowing any form of rebuttal their progressive rants. (The tuition at USC is about $45,000 per year)

The other example is more insidious and perhaps worse as it affects younger and more malleable minds in middle school in Racine, Wisconsin where an 8^th grade crossword puzzle assignment claimed that said conservatism is for ‘restricting personal freedoms’. The Blaze reported:

“Tamra Varebrook, a Republican activist in Racine, Wis., told The Blaze on Thursday that her eighth-grade daughter showed her the crossword-style vocabulary sheet assigned to her at Union Grove Elementary School. Varebrook described the assignment as “indoctrination.”

In another example the father of a 4^th grader found a hand-written note in his son’s backpack in response to a lesson on the Constitution that stated: “I am willing to give up some of my constitutional rights in order to be safer or more secure.” Once again a report in The Blaze stated:

“They’re the words that Florida father Aaron Harvey was stunned to find his fourth-grade son had written, after a lesson in school about the Constitution.

Harvey’s son attends Cedar Hills Elementary in Jacksonville, Fla. Back in January, a local attorney came in to teach the students about the Bill of Rights. But after the attorney left, fourth-grade teacher Cheryl Sabb dictated the sentence to part of the class and had them copy it down, he said.

The paper sat unnoticed in Harvey’s son’s backpack for several months until last week, when his son’s mother almost threw it away. The words caught her eye in the trash, and she showed it to Harvey, who said he was at a loss for words. He asked his son, who said Sabb had spoken the sentence out loud and told them to write it down. Harvey said he asked some of his son’s classmates and got a similar answer.”

I would remind Ms. Sabb of the words of Benjamin Franklin, whom she obviously is not familiar with, when he said: “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

These examples are just a few of thousands that occur each month in the nation’s universities and K-12 public schools. This stuff goes on and on, usually without the knowledge of parents or parents who just don’t give a damn as long as the K-12 schools serve their function as a free babysitting service. This may be the plight of the low information voter.

As for the media, politicians, and government officials here are a few recent examples of the cultural intolerance of the progressive left when it comes to the Bill of Rights, especially the First Amendment:

• AP, ESPN, and FOX refuse to mention ‘NRA 500′ by official name.
• New York town removes veterans’ Gadsden flag for being an offensive Tea Party symbol.
• Students asked to ‘argue that Jews are evil’ and prove Nazi loyalty in assignment linked to Common Core.
• The Breathitt County School District in Kentucky has removed long-standing Ten Commandments displays in local public schools due to pressure from Atheist group.
• Conn. Senator urges FOX not to air NASCAR race because the NRA is sponsoring it.
• Media Working Hand in Glove with Democrats on Gun Legislation.
• The Rehabilitation of the New Left’s terrorists.
• AP refuses to use tags ‘Abortion’ and ‘Reproductive Rights” in Gosnell's murder trial.
• Bill Maher calls ‘The Second Amendment Is Bulls—t!’

These examples were added on April 14, 2013 to demonstrate a few of the issues I am talking about.

Many parents, with the exception of the homeschoolers, are giving up their children to a K-12 education totally imbedded with a progressive, and even socialist, agenda. Many public schools no longer teach moral or Constitutional values. They disdain any semblance of patriotism or love of county. They no longer say the Pledge of Allegiance or recite the Preamble to the Constitution as we did when I was in school back in the day. Children are not expected to excel and they are given good grades for participation rather than excellence. Of course this does not apply to all K-12 schools, but is certainly applies to many across the land. This all part of a foundation laid down years ago by the likes of John Dewey and the teachings of the Frankfurt School.

The latest example of this is the recent rant by MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry when she proclaimed that parents did not have the exclusive right to raise and educate their children — this right belonged to the community, i.e. the state. In a recent promo, MSNBC claims that investing billions more than many other industrialized nations hasn’t produced any real results because we aren’t viewing our children as community property.

In an ad on MSNBC, Harris-Perry calls for "breaking through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents." Instead, she says, we should "recognize that kids belong to whole communities."

Once upon a time, people were treated like people. Businesses didn’t have “Human Resources” departments; they had “Personnel” departments. People aren’t a resource, they’re human beings. A tree is a resource. Coal is a resource. Oil is a resource. People are individuals who have a right to be treated like people.

Apparently, MSNBC and Harris-Parry don’t believe that. They believe that children are somehow the property of the community.

“We have never invested as much in public education as we should have because we’ve always had kind of a private notion of children. Your kid is yours and totally your responsibility,” the promo says, going on to add, “We haven’t had a very collective notion of these are our children. So part of it is we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents or kids belong to their families and recognize that kids belong to whole communities.”

Clearly, we are entering a new phase in family breakdown. In the earlier phases, leftist policies cultivated unrestrained sexual license, abortion and single parenting. Those policies set the stage for new forms of child poverty as well as heightened social divisions along lines of race, class and sex. Their proponents, however, refrained from openly attacking the family in mass media.

Collectivists ignore a huge truth: Any child whose mother and father have committed to rearing that child together with a moral compass has already won the "lottery of birth." Those are intangibles that serve to defy poverty. Those intangibles always tend to trump material circumstances because they don't depend upon material wealth for their existence.

The left has long worked to collapse the family. This is a fact we must face. The obliteration of family influences on kids is essential to the collectivist vision of communitarianism espoused by the left.

The family serves as a buffer zone that shields individuals — particularly children — from the tentacles of its collectivist vision of centralized state power. Harris-Perry's vision is very likely in line with the agenda of Bill Ayers, founder of the Weather Underground and old colleague of President Obama's. For decades Ayres' career focus has been the transformation of K-12 education, especially early childhood education. His wife Bernadine Dohrn has specialized in family law with a strong focus on children.

This ideology has been expressed before by Hitler, Lenin, Mussolini, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Kim Il-sung, and the Jesuits.

Another aspect of the Culture Totalitarianism of the Left can be found in the entertainment and news media industries. Consider one of the most odious facilitators of cultural totalitarianism in American life: the news media. The owners and operators of these private businesses, if they acted from enlightened self-interest, the animating principle of the marketplace, ought to induce the various news corporations to compete with each other. They would seek niches of readers and audiences not served by their competitors. This would also mean exposing the blatant bias of notional rivals and offering a better "product" — that is, more reliable and objective news.

Instead, media outlets like the New York Times behave like cadres of Orwell's Inner Party in 1984, ignoring the failures of its news competitors as long as the competitors do not present genuine competition of ideas. When giant corporations behave as if they were one, then those on the left scream collusion and monopoly, but in the case of the news media, the stupefying fact that tens of millions of Americans literally never hear the different sides of social and political issues does not bother the left at all.

Perhaps more dangerous are the monopolistic practices of the left in the area of entertainment and recreation. Watch contemporary television programs or a new film or the pathetic meanderings of an establishment comic, and what do we see? There is a dull sameness to it all. The same groups who are safely mocked and the same groups made noble victims. The themes never vary, though often they are presented as revolutionary or radical or new.

In TV shows and theatrical films the bad guys are the corporations and Christian groups. On crime shows when there is a murder at an abortion clinic it is always done by some “radical” Christian group that is opposed to abortion. It’s as tough every person committed to the Constitution is a Timothy McVeigh and every person opposed to abortion is an Eric Rudolph.

A part of the Cloward-Piven Strategy is to control the narrative and dialog of the debate by constantly brining up issues that are anathema to conservatives and by using political correct terms to silence their opposition. If you are for traditional marriage between a man and a woman you are labeled as a homophobe. If you do not agree with the policies of a Black president you are called a racist. If you are pro-life you are considered anti-woman and a part of the war against women and wanting to control their bodies. If you are for the Second Amendment and against more gun control you are insensitive to killings in Tucson, Aurora, Virginia Tech, and Sandy Hook. If you are against illegal and uncontrolled immigration you are a xenophobe. And if you are against the welfare state you are a greedy person who does not care about his or her fellow man.

Frédéric Bastiat, French Economist said it best in his 1850 essay The Law when he stated:

"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. We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain."

Bastiat saw arguments based on political correctness 163 years ago and predicted the damage it would cause a civil society.

To make the Cloward-Piven Strategy work the progressives needed Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals. Saul Alinsky helped to establish the confrontational political tactics that characterized the 1960s and have remained central to all subsequent revolutionary movements in the United States. Obama never met Alinsky personally; the latter died when Obama was a young boy. But Obama was trained by the Alinsky-founded Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) in Chicago and worked for an affiliate of the Gamaliel Foundation, whose modus operandi for the creation of “a more just and democratic society” is rooted firmly in the Alinsky method.

In the Alinsky model, "organizing" is a euphemism for "revolution" — a wholesale revolution whose ultimate objective is the systematic acquisition of power by a purportedly oppressed segment of the population, and the radical transformation of America's social and economic structure. The goal is to foment enough public discontent, moral confusion, and outright chaos to spark the social upheaval that Marx, Engels, and Lenin predicted — a revolution whose foot soldiers view the status quo as fatally flawed and wholly unworthy of salvation. Thus, the theory goes, the people will settle for nothing less than that status quo's complete collapse — to be followed by the erection of an entirely new system upon its ruins. Toward that end, they will be apt to follow the lead of charismatic radical organizers who project an aura of confidence and vision, and who profess to clearly understand what types of societal "changes" are needed.

But Alinsky's brand of revolution was not characterized by dramatic, sweeping, overnight transformations of social institutions. As Richard Poe puts it in his book The Shadow Party, "Alinsky viewed revolution as a slow, patient process as did the Fabians. The trick was to penetrate existing institutions such as churches, unions and political parties." Alinsky advised organizers and their disciples to quietly, subtly gain influence within the decision-making ranks of these institutions, and to introduce changes from that platform. It should be noted that for several years Obama himself taught workshops on the Alinsky method.

It is Alinsky’s Rule No. 12 that is used most by the progressive left: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions.” (This is cruel, but very effective. Direct, personalized criticism and ridicule works.) Demonization of the opposition is used almost daily in the media. Rule No. 5: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.” There is no defense. It’s irrational. It’s infuriating. It also works as a key pressure point to force the enemy into concessions works well too.

The final point of the cultural totalitarianism of the Left is the issue of abortion. No issue has torn this nation apart more in the last 40 years than the Supreme Court’s decision to restrict states from passing laws restricting abortion. Roe v. Wade has been captured by the Left as a primary issue in elections where those opposed to any form of abortion are demonized as perpetrating a war on the rights of women. Children as young as 14-years old can get an abortion at a Planned Parenthood abortion mill without their parent’s consent and in some states even notification of the parent.

The progressive left has used this issue for litmus tests on political candidates. If a candidate like Rick Santorum stands against abortion his political capital immediately drops as the media, women’s groups, teachers unions and academia begins to demonize him for his war on women. This is pure Alinsky. Even our current Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius, the former Governor of Kansas, protected the abortionist Dr. George Tiller, known as "Tiller the Baby Killer", while he was performing late term abortions.

Consider the current trial of Dr. Kermit Gosnell taking place in a Philadelphia courtroom where Gosnell is on trial for murder for killing live-born babies. I take the trial excerpts from the Philadelphia Inquirer rather than Hot Air so as not to be accused of using a conservative blog site. The Philadelphia Inquirer is far from a right-leaning newspaper. The PI reports:

“Ashley Baldwin, a 15-year-old sophomore at University City High School who was thinking of becoming a doctor, got a job at one of the busiest clinics in West Philadelphia. She was paid, and in no time went from answering phones to doing ultrasounds, administering intravenous medicine, and, ultimately, assisting in abortions performed by her mentor, Kermit Gosnell.

Now 22 and the mother of a 2-year-old son, Baldwin on Thursday told a Philadelphia Common Pleas Court jury hearing Gosnell's murder trial of her unusual hands-on medical apprenticeship.

Baldwin also told the jury about seeing at least five aborted babies moving, breathing, and, in one case, "screeching" after late-term procedures at the clinic at 3801 Lancaster Ave.

In Pennsylvania, abortions are legal up to 24 weeks of pregnancy. After that, medical experts say, a fetus is capable of living outside the womb.

"They looked just like regular babies," Baldwin said.

Baldwin said one baby was so big that Gosnell joked that "this baby is going to walk me home."

She said the joke bothered her and she talked to her mother about it. Baldwin's mother, however, was also a Gosnell employee. Tina Baldwin had worked there since 2001.

Ashley Baldwin said she assisted Gosnell in abortions, applying pressure to the mother's abdomen, handing the doctor instruments and equipment.

She said she also saw Gosnell use scissors to "snip" the neck of newborns who were moving after the procedure.

Although she sometimes felt uneasy about what she saw, Baldwin said, Gosnell always had an explanation: "He told me that's how it was supposed to go."

Baldwin's tale of her teenage years in an abortion clinic was received calmly by the jury of seven women and five men who have already heard a four-week parade of horrible testimony.

Gosnell, 72, is charged with seven counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of seven infants born alive during abortions and killed by cutting their spinal cords with scissors. If the jury finds him guilty, Gosnell could be sentenced to death.

Gosnell lawyer Jack McMahon has argued that none of the infants was killed, that they were in death throes from the abortion drug Digoxin that Gosnell administered earlier.

Baldwin's testimony ended the fourth week of the trial. Testimony resumes Monday before Judge Jeffrey P. Minehart. The lawyers and witnesses are under a strict gag order.

Like other Gosnell workers, Baldwin testified that Gosnell taught her the rudiments of using an ultrasound, administering IV medicine, and some lab work. She said he told her she was working legally because, as a doctor, he had "grandfathered her in."

"We talked a lot," Baldwin said, and Gosnell gave her medical books so she could read more about what she was doing.

When it came to learning how to start an intravenous line, Baldwin said, Gosnell got a bag of saline solution and a "butterfly needle," rolled up a sleeve, and let her practice on him.

"How much training did you get?" asked Assistant District Attorney Joanne Pescatore.

"Not much, just a little time," replied Baldwin, who described many of the procedures as "not that hard."

Baldwin said she could not remember how much she was paid. Other Gosnell workers have testified that workers were paid, under the table, $10 an hour, and $20 an hour on nights they assisted in late-term abortions.

By the time authorities raided the Women's Medical Society clinic in February 2010, Baldwin said, she had been there almost four years, and was going to school and working up to 50 hours a week, sometimes to 1 or 2 a.m.

Once, when it neared midnight, Baldwin said she told Gosnell she wanted to go home.

"It was a time when other people were leaving and he said he needed me to stay," Baldwin said.

Ashley Baldwin has not been charged with any crime. Tina Baldwin, 47, has pleaded guilty to racketeering, conspiracy, and corrupting a minor — her daughter.

Tina Baldwin also testified Thursday about working the clinic's reception desk.

Baldwin said her daughter's job was not unusual, because Gosnell often hired West Philadelphia high school students and students from his alma mater, Thomas Jefferson University.

Tina Baldwin was not asked about why she let her daughter work at the clinic. Ashley Baldwin said her mother was concerned by her late hours but deferred to her own judgment about the job's demands.

Gosnell also is charged with corrupting a minor, Ashley Baldwin, and with one count of third-degree murder in the Nov. 19, 2009, death of Karnamaya Mongar, 41, a Virginia woman allegedly killed by an overdose of Demerol by Gosnell's untrained staff.

Ashley Baldwin said she was in the clinic on the night Mongar went into cardiac arrest. She said Gosnell was pumping on Mongar's chest and called to her to plug in a defibrillator.

"I got a small shock when I plugged it in," Baldwin added. "It didn't work."

I think by now any human being reading this account of one day at this trial will be thoroughly disgusted. I can’t imagine what it is for the jurors hearing weeks of this stuff. But, that’s the problem. This goes on every day at Planned Parenthood abortion mills across the land every day and it has become so commonplace it is hardly reported. If it is reported as those young investigative reporters working with the late Andrew Breitbart did it is the reporters who are demonized or ignored by the mainstream media and the progressive lefty celebrities in Hollywood and New York.

Michael Vic received way more coverage for his dog fighting trail and PETA gets more support for their defense of catching harmless fish. Can you imagine the coverage if it were dogs? Had Kermit Gosnell killed dogs, HLN would be giving it wall to wall coverage as they do all sorts of sensational trials. Nancy Grace would be in full outrage mode every night. But this is not the case as Erick Erickson writes in Red States:

“In churches, local restaurants, and small town hair salons a lot of people across the country are talking about the terrible trial of Kermit Gosnell in Pennsylvania. It’s just not the people who interact with those who produce the news in New York City.”

It’s sad that a man who engaged in horrific acts of barbarism will never be as known to the public as Casey Anthony or George Zimmerman because Gosnell’s crime is viewed as less than a crime by the vast majority of the producers of American news and the progressive left.

It must be noted here that Kirsten Powers, a liberal contributor to Fox News stated in her column for USA Today:

“A Lexis-Nexis search shows none of the news shows on the three major national television networks has mentioned the Gosnell trial in the last three months. The exception is when Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan hijacked a segment on Meet the Press meant to foment outrage over an anti-abortion rights law in some backward red state.

The Washington Post has not published original reporting on this during the trial and The New York Times saw fit to run one original story on A-17 on the trial’s first day. They’ve been silent ever since, despite headline-worthy testimony.”

And yet, media mentions of the ongoing trial have been conspicuously few and far between. Could it be that the otherwise highly sensational story sheds just a little too much inconveniently negative light on a preferred narrative of theirs? Charles Krauthammer calls it out:

The progressive left does not want to give coverage to anything that might damage their narrative and agenda. This is the way it has been for the past 40 years and why the Cloward-Piven Strategy is working and why our progressive politicians are slowly changing the culture of the nation and destroying our Bill or Rights. Only the Third Amendment has yet to be tampered with. And when it came to academia and its progressive leanings William F. Buckley Jr. had this to say:

“I'd rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.”

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.