This article is a shortened version of "Conspiracy of the lemmings," third in the Cloward/Piven series. It is an effort to explain what motivates socialists to inflict socialism on us despite its indisputable failure in both theory and practice.
Introduction
The United States of America is the world’s marketplace. Without the worldwide trade generated by American demand, the international marketplace will fail. Today we are witnessing an undeniable demonstration of this fact as world markets reel in response to our domestic financial crisis. This lesson must be burnt into our collective conscience.
Our nation is the last repository of free market economic principles, and a fundamental change in our government toward socialism will spell worldwide economic disaster from which we may never recover.
Yet this is exactly the endgame of the American radical Left – increasingly indistinguishable from today’s Democrat Party – and offers the only internally consistent explanation for their historic obsession with divisive policy.
From their early support of Hitler to their central role in the current financial crisis, the Left’s contribution to domestic and foreign policy at federal, state and local levels can only be described as wantonly destructive. Their takeover of schools and popular culture has been equally toxic. Their environmental radicalism has spawned the energy crisis, while offering no viable alternatives. It defies logic.
But there is logic, a deadly logic, and in the '60’s, two radicals gave it a name: the Cloward-Piven Strategy. As explained in a prior article in the series, the goal was to create a groundswell of demands for public services to overwhelm government, create crisis and usher in a widespread call for fundamental economic reform at the federal level, with socialism the ultimate goal.
Cloward and Piven focused on welfare, voting, housing and immigration “rights,” but leftist positions on any issue, whether championing equal “rights,” abortion “rights,” education “rights,” rights to health care, housing, legal protections of antisocial or even criminal behavior, to the point of absurdity, are intentionally divisive.
They add new fiscal and regulatory burdens on government, and set new precedents that undermine the limited government concepts embedded in our Constitution, while conferring discriminatory special benefits on legally defined groups the rest of us are forced to pay for.
They deliberately put our society at war with itself. And as Cloward and Piven made clear, the true purpose is not even to help those groups, but rather to duplicitously enlist them as part of an offensive to collapse our society from within!
Democrats embrace the rhetoric of “compassion,” but look past the rhetoric to the results. This country is polarized as never before because of their relentless agitation for extremist positions on every issue, and the outrageous tactics they use to promote them. While Radical Saul Alinsky’s tactics guide today’s Democrat electoral game plan, the Cloward-Piven Strategy describes the overarching goal of almost every leftwing organization/movement/ideal today.
How do they Survive?
These organizations rarely produce anything of value, yet are extremely adept at not only surviving but flourishing. Many receive their financial backbone from prominent philanthropies. They also receive subsidies and tax breaks with the help of friends in federal, state and local government. This fact is unknown to most voters, who would be outraged if they fully understood how their tax dollars were being spent. For example, the radical group, ACORN, responsible for widespread voter fraud, gets about 40 percent of its revenues, from federal, state and local government.
Our mass media is mostly to blame for the current state of affairs. The Left’s strategies could not survive the light of day. Radicals require a sympathetic media to deliver their message in an acceptable fashion and actively suppress inconvenient facts that reveal these organizations’ true character and agenda. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign and presidency are perhaps the most poignant current example of this. Without mass media’s shamelessly biased support, Obama would still be community organizing, or perhaps be in jail.
It is a tangled web of radical interconnections with the ultimate goal being an end to our Constitutional framework, the fall of our Republic and its replacement with a radical vision of socialist utopia – finally removing the last major roadblock to world socialism.
These radical individuals are highly motivated, in many cases intelligent and talented, and sometimes even driven by what they would describe as altruistic motives. Yet the impacts of socialist central planning are inarguably destructive.
Marx may have had some interesting insights on history, but despite his ponderous three volume “Das Kapital” he was no economist. Instead, Kapital provided the intellectual excuse for Marx’s anarchistic Communist Manifesto.
And the severe verdict of history on his perverted vision is without equal: over 100 million people murdered by their own governments in times of peace, more than all the wars of history combined. The rest face abject poverty, mass starvation, economic and environmental ruin, all overseen by smothering, indescribably brutal governments – a grey, barren existence for all but the apparatchiks. So why are so many Westerners infatuated with this demented vision?
Entrepreneurial Parasites
The high-minded types are driven by a galling sense of intellectual superiority. They are addicted to their own egos. They know better than everyone else and can defy the verdict of history because people as smart as they are weren’t around when Russia, China, Vietnam, Cambodia, North Korea, Ethiopia, Angola, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Congo, Nicaragua, Cuba, Venezuela, etc., went Red.
Living well in affluent, capitalist America, it is all theoretical, so they can indulge their fantasies with impunity while promoting this destructive agenda. For these people ignorance is literally a blessing, for if they soberly analyzed their ego-driven beliefs, they would be embarrassed.
If you examine their pasts closely, you learn that most of these people also came from upper class backgrounds. PhD Chemistry Professor George Wiley, the black radical who led Cloward and Piven’s National Welfare Rights Organization, was a well-to-do son of a Rhode Island family.
Wade Rathke, the NWRO veteran who started ACORN, was from a similarly well-to-do background, although he dropped out of Williams College.
Obama’s radical friend Bill Ayers’ family was very wealthy. Looking at his arrest photos, and listening to his smug self-righteousness, you really get the impression that he was little more than an arrogant, spoiled brat, with a titanic sense of entitlement that allowed him to rationalize mass murder.
This is a familiar story throughout the American left and indeed with many of the most infamous communist leaders around the world. For example, Communist China’s first leader, Mao Zedong, the inspiration for Ayers and many other radicals, was son of the wealthiest man in his home town.
According to the incredible biography, Mao: the Unknown Story, he was lazy, arrogant, and refused to work, despite his father’s repeated attempts to find him suitable employment. He finally saw an opportunity for real advancement working for the Soviets. During the Long March Mao was carried by porters.
As young idealists, many of these people are initially snared into this ideology by the exaggerated sense of self-importance that is often a characteristic of youth. But we all have to live, and as they grow up they discover that the radical profession can be a pretty lucrative racket.
Despite their high-minded rhetoric about saving the poor and oppressed, communists and socialists are what I call entrepreneurial parasites.
Consider what they demand of us: sacrifice of all worldly goods to the state, penurious, barren lifstyles, slavish observance of their dictates and full-time commitment to the well-being of the state, while our jobs, careers, industries, the environment, even our lives are threatened. But how do they live?
Obama’s pal Ayers, who describes himself as a “small ‘c’ communist,” lives in a lavish home, in the upscale Hyde Park neighborhood, with a six-figure (or more) income. It is easy to see how, given the open spigot of money his organizations receive from the various non-profit funds he’s ingratiated himself to. Bill Ayers father, Tom, had been CEO of Commonwealth Edison, so he’s used to money, and later developments in his career point to a hand up from Daddy.
Barack lives in Hyde Park too.
It is difficult to find anyone in the American Marxist elite who doesn’t fully enjoy the fruits of capitalism in his or her personal life. In fact, Obama’s early career seems to have been centered on dispensing foundation money as a means to secure his career in politics. Here and here are perfect examples.
Marxist austerity is only meant for the rest of us.
This taste for wealth is not limited to American socialists. Every socialist dictator from Stalin to Saddam has lived in opulent surroundings with multiple estates, scores of servants and every kind of luxury and indulgence available to them. See for example, Gorbachev’s dacha in Foros, Crimea; a testament to communist modesty if ever there was one.
Same with all the leaders of communist countries. Indeed, Bulgarian defector Georgi Markov was murdered for his extensive reporting on the opulent, decadent lifestyles of Bulgarian Communist leaders. It’s a good racket, if you don’t mind blood.
While socialist leaders live in lavish style, in every country where socialist policies are imposed, they measurably worsen the lives of everyday citizens in direct proportion to their scope. Even countries with vast natural resources, like Russia, founder because their economies are constructed on the fatally flawed economic principles of socialism.
Despite this, they still manage to live on, in many cases hanging by mere threads for years.
How?
The dirty little secret of socialism is that it cannot survive without capitalism – capitalist countries provide the resources necessary for these socialist governments to continue. In addition to providing a market for their goods, Western nations keep socialist countries afloat through grants and loans from the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development and other governmental institutions, as well as huge investments by private companies.
Even China, widely misunderstood as the next “free market,” only practices market economics one-way in international trade while maintaining iron fisted central planning internally, and could not maintain its current level of economic growth without the markets provided by the United States and other Western countries.
Finally, there is a vast network of American enterprises, owned covertly by foreign dictators, whose true purpose is to provide underground income for these leaders and their socialist governments, while offering convenient cover for industrial and military spies. This fact is rarely mentioned and largely unknown.
At its core, socialism can only be parasitic. It cannot survive without its capitalist host.
Therefore, if the United States becomes a socialist country, worldwide capital will soon dry up. Remaining market economies around the world will succumb either to their own internal socialist movements or direct military threat from abroad. Without the protective umbrella of American military might, they will have no other choice.
Without the markets and resources capitalist economies provide, the many socialist countries that have survived on our largesse until now will find their income stream shut off. The world will plunge into an unprecedented, cataclysmic depression. This depression will be of indeterminate length because the wherewithal for recovery – a large capitalist economy – will no longer exist.
With a world controlled by parasites, the host will die. At this point even the parasites will be in danger. The socialists’ internationalist agenda truly is a Conspiracy of the Lemmings. It is not merely a criminal conspiracy, it is criminally insane.
There is nothing new under the sun. Socialism cannot cure the world's ills. It wasn't even designed to. It is merely the cleverest methodology ever devised by which the world's con men and thugs could take their rackets global and earn untold riches. It is a stark demonstration of one of man's oldest temptations: the lust for wealth and power.
A much smarter man than I observed this in a little-known pamphlet titled "The History and Impact of Marxist-Leninist Organizational Theory;" and he should know. John P. Roche was the socialist founder of Americans for Democratic Action, adviser to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, and until his unfortunate death in 1994, a regular contributor to National Review magazine. He understood communists and socialists better than most men living, having had to deal directly with them for most of his life. He said:
Most analyses of Marxism-Leninism are philosophical exercises coducted in the intellectual stratosphere. This approach has a limited utility, but is based on a deeply flawed premise: that Marxism-Leninism a form of high theory, rather than a operational code for a new-style mafia, (emphasis mine) far more interested in finding a rationale for seizing or wielding power than in liberating "prisoners of starvation" or the "wretched of the earth."
"New-style mafia, far more interested in finding a rationale for seizing or wielding power..." Rings true, doesn't it?
Last fall I wrote:
If [Obama] is elected we can expect a sea change in Washington. But it will not be for the better. The socialist economic agenda he has publicly articulated is enough in the current financial crisis to plunge our economy into deep recession. The disarmament agenda he has publicly articulated is enough to strip us of the meager defenses we currently have against a rogue missile attack, and Iran has already telegraphed plans to launch such an attack. What is even more frightening is the agenda he has not shared, but is implicit in his radical upbringing, his radical connections, and his limited but demonstrative experience.
Since his election, Obama has revealed his true nature for all to see. Described in some detail on Friday, his recent trip to Copenhagen was a poignant, unseemly example of entrepreneurial parasites at work, chief among them, the President of the United States. Yet another is the decision for the federal government to provide a $2 billion dollar loan for a Brazilian oil exploration firm owned partly by Obama benefactor George Soros, while offshore drilling in U.S. is banned.
This same corrupt, power hungry, thuggish mindset is apparent in every advisor or "czar" Obama has put around him. It is apparent in every piece of legislation he has signed or supported to date.
The "Stimulus" bill will stimulate only those likely to vote Democrat, and it won't start working until next year, just in time for the 2010 elections. In the meantime, the economy continues to tank and we all are left to suffer.
The Health "reform" and Cap and Trade bills will confiscate huge swaths of the private economy, and make the American population more vulnerable to manipulation and control than ever. These were written to take effect in 2013, when the Democrats are gambling they will have complete control, and thus be immune to the enormous backlash this legislation is certain to create.
This president is taking our country on a path to destruction. He can do no different, because he is of a type, an entrepreneurial parasite.
Our one last chance is 2010. The current crop in Congress must be replaced with strong, principled leaders dedicated to upholding the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law.
Only such a qualified, courageous, bunch will have the stomach to repeal the destructive legislation signed into law by this president, launch an investigation and prepare the articles of impeachment he so richly deserves.
The hour is late and time is nigh. We cannot waste another second. This is a clarion call to action: America awaken! Arise, for the enemy is at the gates.
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