Thursday, August 5, 2010

The Destruction of What We Used to Call America

by j. wright

The following is from an email I sent to a friend who shared lunch with me yesterday. We started a chat regarding the current state of the nation. Obviously time didn't allow for either of us to say all that we wanted so I sent this email today, to "flesh out" some of my points. It goes as follows:

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Hi,
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We discussed some of this for a time yesterday. Maybe your friend would be interested in it. It may not set well with either of you but it's a definite reality and one too many Americans don't have the time to explore. We're too busy being intentionally distracted to see what the "other hand" is doing.
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THE PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENT
The Progressive Movement began late in the 19th Century. Its Central Tenets are Statism, Income Redistribution, Unionism, Government Management of the Economy, womb to tomb provision for its citizens, eugenics, and a Libertine Social Policy. To accomplish these aims, The Progressive Movement believes in State Ownership of Businesses—instead of Entrepreneurial Free Enterprise; Central Planning by the Government of the supply of goods and services, including fixing prices of wages, and of goods and services—instead of Free Market Capitalism; That all Citizens should have equal wealth except for the Elite Rulers; And that Sovereignty does not belong to Individual Citizens—but that the People only exist (as a collective) for the benefit of the National State. Various large parts of this Ideology are identical to Socialism and Fascism, including the ideas that the use of courts, bureaucracies—even the police and military—should be used to accomplish goals that would never be approved by a Democracy or a Republic (such as The United States of America under its current Constitution).

Recent history shows us that this system didn't work out too well in the USSR... nor is it really working in today's Russia, but no matter, the Progressives, with their arrogance and belief that they alone know what's best for you and me, keep forging ahead.


H. G. WELLS
THE FATHER OF THE PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENT
The Father of The Progressive Movement was H.G. Wells, the noted science fiction author. Wells was a devotee of Darwinism and part of his mission was to reassign human beings from the spiritual to the natural world. The best way to get to know the Father of the Progressive Movement is to read his own quotes:

"People of quality must be ascendant not democracy"

"Base and servile types are little more than a leaping, glittering confusion of shoaling mackerel on a sunlit afternoon."

"The State that most resolutely picks over, educates, sterilizes or poisons its People of the Abyss will be most successful."

"Death would merely end the bitterness of their failure."

"It should be their lot to die out and disappear . . . since they are born of unrestrained lusts ... and multiplying through sheer incontinence and stupidity."

"Idiots, drunkards, criminals, lunatics, invalids, and the diseased would spoil the world for others."

He (like another well known Progressive: George Bernard Shaw) believed we should prevent people below a certain intelligence and income from reproducing. At the least they should isolated for their failures on a island. "Remove the unfit so we have no need for jails or prisons." Abolish democracy because the "common uneducated man is a violent fool in social and political affairs." What was required was a "great central organization that would dictate what would be done here, there and everywhere . . . imposing its will upon a recalcitrant race." He called his own political philosophy "Liberal Fascism." Wells said of Joseph Stalin "I have never met a man more candid, fair and honest." Wells was a big booster of eugenics, which is based solidly on Darwinism, of course—that unfortunately found its full flower in Nazi Germany with mass extermination.
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JOHN DEWEY
PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION
John Dewey was the most influential reformer of the public education system in the United States in the 20th Century. As a major player in The Progressive Movement, he completely rejected belief in God. If you ever wonder why high school graduates can't read, can't make change, and do not believe in objective truth, look no further.
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CHAIRMAN MAO
MORAL RELATIVISM
Progressives are Moral Relativists, meaning, that concrete right and wrong do not exist; that nothing substantive can be said about morality. This can lead to obvious problems since Hitler, Stalin, Mao and PolPot, to name a few, all thought the rampant murder of millions of people was perfectly moral—providing it served the interests of the National State.
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SUPREME COURT JUSTICE OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
LEGAL POSITIVISM
Another member of The Progressive Movement was Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. It was Judge Holmes who made the Philosophy of Legal Positivism—that there is no connection between the law and ethics or morality; that the truth is whatever gives people satisfaction—popular in the legal profession. This school of thought dominated our courts in the latter 20th Century with the unfortunate effect of leading to a collapse of our once common moral language. Judge Holmes famously said, as he ordered the forced sterilization of a woman, "It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind . . . three generations of imbeciles are enough."
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MARGARET SANGER
PLANNED PARENTHOOD
Another prominent Progressive was the Founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger. Here a few of her words from her books or speeches: "The most merciful thing that a large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it." Regarding blacks, immigrants and indigents she said this, "Human weeds, reckless breeders, spawning . . . human beings who never should have been born." Concerning the rights of the handicapped and mentally ill, and racial minorities: "More children from the fit, less from the unfit -- that is the chief aim of birth control."On the extermination of blacks: "We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members." In her "Plan for Peace," Sanger outlined her strategy for eradication of those she deemed "feebleminded." Sanger espoused the thinking of eugenicists -- similar to Darwin's "survival of the fittest" -- but related the concept to human society, saying the genetic makeup of the poor, and minorities, for example, was inferior. One of Sanger's greatest influences, sexologist/eugenicist Dr. Havelock Ellis (with whom she had an affair, leading to her divorce from her first husband), urged mandatory sterilization of the poor as a prerequisite to receiving any public aid.
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The goal of eugenicists is "to prevent the multiplication of bad stocks," wrote Dr. Ernst Rudin in the April 1933 Birth Control Review (of which Sanger was editor). Another article exhorted Americans to "restrict the propagation of those physically, mentally and socially inadequate." Regarding adultery, "A woman's physical satisfaction was more important than any marriage vow," Sanger believed.

WALTER DURANTY on JOSEF STALIN
THE ULTIMATE PROGRESSIVE
The Progressive newspaper the New York Times employed—and the Progressive Pulitzer Prize was awarded to—one Walter Duranty. Duranty was posted in Moscow for 15 years to report back to the American people what was going on over there. He was so caught up in The Progressive Movement that he described Joseph Stalin as a "decent and clean-living man and a great leader." Duranty reported that there was no famine in the USSR--- (The truth? Forced Famine in the Ukraine, 1932-1933 causing 7,000,000 Deaths) though it is clear from his notes and letters that he was lying through his teeth, and that he knew full well the scale of the calamity, and even knew the USSR was deliberately starving millions of its own people. He also defended Stalin's notoriously phony show trials that resulted in the execution of millions of innocent people.
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SAUL ALINSKY (...a favorite mentor among today's progressives.)
COMMUNITY ORGANIZING
A more recent champion of The Progressive Movement is Saul Alinsky. Alinsky is the father of the modern community organizing movement, of which ACORN is a prominent example. One of his key philosophies is for a community organization to claim non-partisanship, in order to receive grants from the government (of monies confiscated from taxpayers) that are illegal to be given to a partisan group. This is obviously a sham, since none of their stated goals could be remotely described as Conservative, and their members vote for Democrats in elections virtually 100%. In effect, they use the wages of Conservatives to fight against them and everything they believe in.
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Here is a quote from Alinsky, "Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical: from all our legends, mythology, and history, the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom—Lucifer." Another of his famous quotes is this, "There's another reason for working inside the system. Taking a new step is what people fear most. Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people. They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and change the future." (Referred to as "Hope and Change" in the 2008 presidential campaign.) And finally this, "Our rebels have contemptuously rejected the values and the way of life of the middle class."

BOY SCOUTS
THE ENEMY OF PROGRESSIVES
Today's Progressives have singled out the Boy Scouts as a target for their wrath, repeatedly filing lawsuits against this organization—that has helped a multitude of boys become fine men—to prevent them from having a building in which to meet. This is understandable since the entire philosophy of the Boy Scouts is sickening to The Progressive Movement. The best evidence of this is that ominous Boy Scout Oath: "On my honor, I will do my best; To do my duty To God and my country; And to obey the Scout Law; To help other people at all times; To keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight." Scouts must promise to be honorable, loyal, useful, friendly, dutiful, courteous, thrifty, cheerful, kind to animals, and clean in thought, word and deed. Rather subversive ideas.
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ALDOUS HUXLEY
BRAVE NEW WORLD
Let me share with you some thoughts of a voice crying in wilderness long ago, warning us of the dangers of The Progressive Movement. In 1932, in his classic book, "Brave New World," Huxley wrote, "All members of society are conditioned in childhood to hold the values that the World State idealizes. Constant consumption is the bedrock of stability Recreational heterosexual sex is an integral part of society. In The World State, sex is a social activity rather than a means of reproduction and is encouraged from early childhood; the few women who can reproduce are conditioned to take birth control. The maxim "everyone belongs to everyone else" is repeated often, and the idea of a "family" is repellent. As a result, sexual competition and emotional, romantic relationships are obsolete. Marriage, natural birth, the notion of being a parent, and pregnancy are considered too obscene to be mentioned in casual conversation."
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THE PROGNOSTICATOR
And I will leave you with forecasts Huxley made in two interviews. In 1949 he said that sometime in the future, "I believe that the world's leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience." And in 1959 he said, "And it seems to me perfectly in the cards that there will be within the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing ... a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda, brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods."

Here is another good research source:

The Progressive Presidents: Roosevelt, Wilson, Roosevelt, Johnson
authored by John Morton Blum
Pages: 221
Contributors: John Morton Blum
Publisher: Norton
Place of Publication: New York
Publication Year: 1980
Subjects: Executive Power--United States,United States--Politics And Government--20th Century

Not to mention that many Republican presidents like Teddy Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover and both Bush's were leaning towards progressivism as well, especially Hoover.

Now, posted below is what is happening today, actually since the mid-1960s... remember those questionable days?


The Cloward-Piven Strategy to implement socialist revolution

http://www.canadaka.net/forums/us-politics-f18/the-cloward-piven-strategy-to-implement-socialist-revolution-t8516.html

Source: http://www.discoverthenetwork.com/group ... grpid=6967

Cloward-Piven is a strategy for forcing political change through orchestrated crisis. ("Never let a good crisis to go to waste." Rahm Emanuel- Obama WH Chief of Staff)

The strategy was first proposed in 1966 by Columbia University political scientists Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven as a plan to bankrupt the welfare system and produce radical change. Sometimes known as the "crisis strategy" or the the "flood-the-rolls, bankrupt-the-cities strategy," the Cloward-Piven approach called for swamping the welfare rolls with new applicants - more than the system could bear. It was hoped that the resulting economic collapse would lead to political turmoil and ultimately socialism. (i.e., Today's massive unemployment numbers, fueled by this unending recession putting states into near bankruptcy with added joblessness due to businesses not hiring because of the uncertainty of what ObamaCare and future federal tax increases will cost them.)

The National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), founded by African-American militant George Alvin Wiley, put the Cloward-Piven strategy to work in the streets. Its activities led directly to the welfare crisis that bankrupted New York City in 1975.

Veterans of NWRO went on to found the Living Wage Movement and the Voting Rights Movement, both of which rely on the Cloward-Piven strategy and both of which are spear-headed by the radical cult ACORN.

Both the Living Wage and Voting Rights movements depend heavily on financial support from George Soros's Open Society Institute.
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On August 11, 1965, the black district of Watts in Los Angeles exploded into violence, after police used batons to subdue a man suspected of drunk driving. Riots raged for six days, spilling over into other parts of the city, and leaving 34 dead. Two Columbia University sociologists, Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven were inspired by the riots to develop a new strategy for social change. In November 1965 - barely three months after the fires of Watts had subsided - Cloward and Piven began privately circulating copies of an article they had written called "Mobilizing the Poor: How it Could Be Done." Six months later (on May 2, 1966), it was published in The Nation, under the title, "The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty."
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(This may have inspired the progressives in LBJ's administration to invoke the so-called War On Poverty, which to date, nearly fifty years later, has received trillions of taxpayer dollars to no avail: the poverty rate does not change.)
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The article electrified the Left. Following its May 2, 1966 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.
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Richard A. Cloward was then a professor of social work at Columbia University. He died in 2001. His co-author Frances Fox Piven was a research associate at Columbia's School of Social Work. She now holds a Distinguished Professorship of Political Science and Sociology at the City University of New York.
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In their 1966 article, Cloward and Piven charged that the ruling classes used welfare to weaken the poor. By providing a social safety net, the rich doused the fires of rebellion. Cloward and Piven wanted to fan those flames. 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, 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. So wrote Cloward and Piven in 1966.
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The key to sparking this rebellion would be to expose the inadequacy of the welfare state. This Cloward and Piven proposed to do, in classic Alinsky fashion, by forcing welfare bureaucrats to live up to their own book of rules.

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." (Or into new homes with huge unpayable mortgages that they could never afford.) 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." (We just watched Congress pass an economic "reform" bill last week.)
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Their article called for "cadres of aggressive organizers" to use "demonstrations to create a climate of militancy." (ACORN?) Intimidated by 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 "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.
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The Cloward-Piven strategy never achieved its goal of system breakdown and a Marxist utopia. But it provided a blueprint for some of the Left's most destructive campaigns of the next three decades. It will likely haunt America for years to come since George Soros' Shadow Party has now adopted the strategy, honing it into a far more efficient weapon than any of its Sixties-era promoters could have foreseen.
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Cloward and Piven recruited a militant black organizer named George Wiley to lead their new movement. For more information on Wiley and his welfare rights movement. In the summer of 1967, Wiley founded the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), with headquarters in Washington, DC. Wiley's tactics closely followed the recommendations set out in Cloward and Piven's article. His followers invaded welfare offices across the nation - 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.
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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."
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These methods proved effective. "The flooding succeeded beyond Wiley's wildest dreams," writes Sol Stern in the Manhattan Institute's 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 reckless welfare spending, New York City - the financial capital of the world - was forced to declare bankruptcy in 1975. The entire state of New York nearly went down with it. Leftist agitators swooned in triumph. The Cloward-Piven strategy had proved its effectiveness.
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The Backlash

The Cloward-Piven strategy depended on surprise. Once society recovered from the initial shock, the backlash began. New York's welfare crisis horrified the nation, 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.
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Most Americans to this day have never heard of Cloward and Piven. But Mayor Rudolph Giuliani attempted to expose them in the late 1990's. As his drive for welfare reform heated up, 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."
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Cloward and Piven never again revealed their intentions as candidly as they had in their 1966 article. They learned to cover their tracks. 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.
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The Cloward-Piven strategy - first proposed in 1966 - 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. Application of this strategy contributed greatly to the turmoil of the late Sixties. Cloward-Piven failed to usher in socialism, but it succeeded in generating an economic crisis and in escalating the level of political violence in America - two cherished goals of hard-Left strategists.
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Radical organizers today continue tinkering with variations on the Cloward-Piven theme, in the perennial hope of reproducing '60s-style chaos. The thuggish behavior of leftwing unions such as SEIU and of certain elements of George Soros' Shadow Party can be traced, in a direct line of descent, from the early practitioners of Cloward-Piven.
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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 "1989" book Rules for Radicals. When pressed to honor every jot and tittle of every law and statute; every Judaeo-Christian moral tenet; and every implicit promise of the liberal social contract, human agencies inevitably fall short. The system's failure to "live up" to its rule book can then be used to discredit it altogether, and to replace the capitalist "rule book" with a socialist one.
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In its earliest form, the Cloward-Piven strategy applied Alinsky's principle to the specific area of welfare entitlements. It counseled activists to create what might be called Trojan Horse movements - mass movements whose outward purpose seemed to be providing material help to the downtrodden, but whose real purpose was to draft poor people into service as revolutionary foot soldiers.
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The specific function of these Trojan Horse movements was to mobilize poor people en masse to overwhelm government agencies with a flood of demands beyond the capacity of those agencies to meet. (Today they have added the racial element, and it seems to be doing what they expected.) 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, at least, was the theory behind the Cloward-Piven strategy.
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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.
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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 widely blamed today 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.
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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, bogus charges of "racism" and "disenfranchisement" and "direct action" (street protests, violent or otherwise). Just as they swamped America's welfare offices in the 1960s, the Cloward-Piven team now seeks to overwhelm the nation's understaffed and poorly policed electoral system. Their antics 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. For more information on the Voting Rights Movement, see the entry for "Project Vote."
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Both the Living Wage and Voting Rights movements depend heavily on financial support from George Soros's Open Society Institute. It is largely thanks to money from Soros that the Cloward-Piven strategy continues even now to eat away at America's political and economic infrastructure.
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As I mentioned earlier, these people, besides being evil, are very patient; they know as surely as the sun rises in the east that one day their ultimate aim will be accomplished. Losing an election or two, or even the White House, is no big deal because they know that eventually they will regain it all. They quietly chip away at our liberties, one by one. Today they are slashing away, openly, and it will take more than just an election or two just to slow their advance.
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The Progressives big ally is the national media, consisting of probably a higher majority of "believers" than even in our government, especially in our civil servant protected federal bureaucracies. It's difficult to really say where the real power lies... in the media or the government? Together, they are an evil force intent on destroying what we used to call America. Possibly our salvation lies within the newly generated Tea Party movement and it's principles that mirror those the Founders originally laid out. Time will tell.
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jaq~


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