Every time the matter of extending Bush’s personal tax breaks on all Americans and extending the “death taxes” and keeping business taxes low . . . every time these matters are mentioned, the progressive Democrats in power in the House, Senate and Oval Office hit us with some version of the following lies and their corollaries. For example:
#1 Bush’s economic policies created (via the Wall Street mess) our present financial malaise . . . we need to go in another direction.
#2 Republicans have made a big deal out of rising deficits and rising national debt and yet they’re intent on dropping taxes on millionaires that would add $700 Billion to the deficit.
#3 Conservatives in general and Republicans, in particular, and the free market have failed us once again and government had to save the day . . . so why give them another chance to screw us up?
#4 Those Bush tax cuts have been around for nearly a decade and they didn’t do any good, quite the contrary.#5 They put our car into the ditch and yet they want the keys returned; we’d be foolish to give them back because they don’t know how to drive.
We will deal with these lies shortly, explaining why they are false and what the actual truth is . . . for now it’s important to realize that once a lie or other misperception has been disseminated by political liars, it tends to take hold (and sometimes take on a life of its own) unless it’s immediately challenged and proven false. The longer it goes unchallenged, the more entrenched the lie** becomes.
Both Goebbels and Hitler gave credit to people like Walter Winchell, Edward Bernays, and George Creel; and especially to America’s Wilson administration for creating the science of propaganda which the Nazis would later use to such powerful effect. Even as early as 1924, Hitler, in Mein Kampf, mentioned the power of the “Big Lie” to completely dominate political debate.
Isn’t it finally time we got to the full truth?
How did it start, this domination of lies over truth in Americans’ understanding of the national political debate? The end game for all propaganda is to change the historical record into something favorable to your side and to control public opinion. Today’s progressives (the name “progressive” was dropped after Woodrow Wilson left office and the label “liberal” remained the self-definition of choice for the leftist politicians for roughly 86 years thereafter) would have Americans believe that they, the progressives, have invented and created America’s greatness over the objections of more fiscally-conservative and Constitutionally-conservative Americans. Literally, they would have you believe that they dragged the country kicking and screaming into the modern era.
Progressives would also claim that they were the ones advocating racial equality all along. The Democratic Party was the party of slavery in the Pre-Civil War days and the party of Jim Crow in the South. Wilson himself was a racist. He’s the one who stopped Blacks being hired by the federal government in Washington, D.C.; and even as president of Princeton University did everything in his power to discourage Black attendance there. The premier of D.W. Griffith’s racist masterpiece “Birth of a Nation” took place in the White House with Wilson presiding over the ceremonious affair. Wilson personally authored a dramatically revisionist interpretation of American history and severe criticism of the Constitution (The New Freedom) calling for progressivism to save the country. Progressives (those who believe, “we must ‘progress’ beyond the outdated and ill-conceived U.S. Constitution” and who emphasize making ‘progress’ toward bringing about some version of earthly Utopia) have reaffirmed the Wilson era name for themselves today and shown much more openness in their connection to socialism and even Marxism, more on that later . . . for now let’s address those five Big Lies.
Big Lie #1 “Bush’s economic policies created (via the Wall Street mess) our present financial malaise . . . we need to go in another direction.” Talking about the “Wall Street Mess” is like talking about the top three feet of the huge iceberg that the Titanic ran into and claiming that all the damage was done by that top yard of snow. What did cause 98% of the damage to America’s economy in 2007 and beyond? In 1975 the United States had a home-loan system almost totally run by the private sector. Ownership of homes by private citizens averaged over 64% we were the envy of the world. At that time only one in every 404 loans was offered at 3% down payment or less (usually to former military officers attending college) 0.24% of all home mortgages. Mortgage default was almost unknown. In 1977, President Jimmy Carter and his progressive Democrats controlling both chambers of Congress passed the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA ’77) to fix a situation that was NOT broken. The impetus of the new law was to force mortgage lenders to make bad loans. The percentage of potentially risky home loans in the 28 years following CRA ’77 rose by 13,800% and to make the situation worse 1) in 2005, 34% of all home loans were granted at 3% down payment or less and many of them were granted at an unheard of 0% down payment while 2) ACORN and others pushing for these loans after Bill Clinton’s 1998’s steroid version expansion of CRA ’77 found it as easy to move poor people without credit into $400,000-$500,000 homes as it had been to move more qualified poor people into $60,000 homes in the 1980s. In other words, 98% of the financial meltdown was caused by government interference in the mortgage markets created by progressive politicians giving us the sub-prime lending crisis.
As far as the “Wall Street Debacle” documented by The Big Short author Michael Lewis and others . . . yes, that was created by Wall Street greed exploiting the policies of the Federal Reserve Bank which had allowed “derivative” investments to be sold. Fed Chief Alan Greenspan once hailed derivatives as “the savior of the financial markets, practically guaranteeing that financial collapses are impossible. The creator of the Federal Reserve and the inflation that has dominated American policies over the last century (the dollar today is worth nine pennies compared to the dollar of 100 years ago): President Woodrow Wilson, who also gave us the income tax and government propaganda. So let’s give Wall Street greed 0.5% of the blame; Alan Greenspan 0.5% of the blame and progressive politicians 98% + 1% = 99% of the guilt. Nevertheless, they have enthusiastically been blaming everyone but themselves.
Big Lie #2 says, “Republicans have made a big deal out of rising deficits and rising national debt and yet they’re intent on dropping taxes on millionaires that would add $700 Billion to the deficit.” First note that the deficit mentioned is $700 Billion over ten years . . . unsaid is that the combined policies of Nancy Pelosi over four years and Barack Obama over two years have swelled the national debt by roughly $5 Trillion, that is seven times the $700 Billion mention in far less time with almost no Republican help. Secondly, the Keynesian economists in the White House are infamous for pie-in-the-sky arithmetic when projecting the effects of their ruinous policies but using zero-sum ideas to evaluate conservative ideas. In this case, there is no mention of the probable GREAT DEPRESSION #2 that their tax hike on the small business community will create (the top 2% of the tax-paying populace creates 70% of all new jobs); or of the stimulus to job creation and economic recovery that will swell the government’s tax coffers via extension of the Bush cuts to those top 2%. And, of course, there are also all those bad loans forced upon mortgage lenders by CRA ’77 (and all the extensions to it over the last 33 years) providing a huge drag on the economy and on government revenues also contributing to the deficits.
As for Big Lie #3 which says “Conservatives in general and Republicans, in particular, and the free market have failed us once again and government had to save the day, again . . . so why give them another chance to screw us up?” This is specifically the Barney Frank lie repeated early and often while he assured us that our mortgage system in general and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in particular were on completely sound footing. 1) First of all, Barney Frank and folks like Chris Dodd totally failed in their key oversight roles; they failed to see the problem coming which their policies had created and exacerbated. And let’s emphasize the fact that the problem was not subtle and hidden from view. James Stack of Investech.com first mentioned the sub-prime lending crisis in November, 2003 and declared that the economy was in a very vulnerable state accompanying his “Housing Industry Bubble Chart” for an unheard of five consecutive years on the website. 2) George W. Bush and his administration brought the matter to the country’s attention in January, 2005, fourteen months later. Bush called for new legislation wiping out the worst aspects of CRA ’77 legislation and the expansions that followed (four by Bill Clinton – three legislatively in ’98 with two others in ’95; and a wide-sweeping regulatory expansion in 1993) that had created the sub-prime lending crisis. Bush’s efforts failed but he would speak to Congress on eighteen more occasions to emphasize the problems that the sub-prime lending expansion had brought to the country. However, numerous savage refutations by Frank and Dodd and the entire Democratic leadership kept future attempts from bearing fruit. Finally in July, 2007, thirty months after Bush first brought the matter to Congress’s attention, a very late, very weak and very limited version of Bush’s January, 2005 effort was passed.
Of course it proved way too little, way too late and the meltdown began in October, 2007. However, Bush’s effort was credited and praised in August, 2010, by Obama Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner with preventing a serious plunge in home prices and a worse and absolutely devastating recession.
Remember, Barney Frank said, “. . . the free markets and Wall Street got us into trouble, again, and the government had to come to their rescue, again . . .” the facts show however that the truth instead is that the economy was weakened devastatingly because of CRA’77’s effect over thirty years and that as early as 2005 34% of all mortgage lending were potentially suspect forced loans legislated upon lenders and the ensuing bubble in home prices; and the ensuing bubble in housing industry stocks proved to be full of hot air and nothing else as everything collapsed.
Big Lie #4 says that the Bush tax cuts have been around for nearly a decade and rather than helping out, they sabotaged us and helped bring about our present financial crisis. The truth about this lie will be discussed as part of the discussion of Big Lie #5. For now, the general truth is that the tax cuts did a helluva lot of good, but you can’t feel secure in believing that without a lot of background facts. Let’s get to it!
Big Lie #5 says, “They (conservatives and Republicans and the free markets) put our car (the American economy) into the ditch (deep recession) and yet now they want the keys returned, we’d be foolish to give them back because they don’t know how to drive.” 1) The progressive Democrats don’t decide who “gets the keys and runs the country,” the American voters do and the voters instinctively know things are not exactly as the Democratic Party claims they are . . . and the recent ringing rejection of the policies of Obama and the Democratically-controlled House and Senate in this November’s elections confirmed their distrust . . . but we can do much better than relying on “instinct” 2) We’ve already shown that 98% of the problem can be attributed directly to 30+ years of serious big government interference boondoggling. 3) We’ve also shown that in January, 2005 Bush called for undoing the poisonous CRA ’77 laws and then continued to call for it almost 20 times until a weak anti-CRA law was passed. The progressive Democrats not only created and exacerbated the problem; they also provided thirty months of obstruction to fixing the problem and their obstruction also resulted in a weaker and later law to fight the problem.
In short: the truths are these: A) Big Lie #4 is corrected by saying that in all likelihood the Bush Tax Cuts fueled the economy and made the CRA problem much less serious than it other wise would be and B) Big Lie #5 is corrected with this stunning statement:
George W. Bush saw the progressive Democrats, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and especially ACORN pushing the car (the economy) toward a 500-foot ditch and jumped into the front seat grabbing the wheel and slamming on the brakes to guide the car into the nearest friendly-looking ditch.
That italicized statement is so outrageous that we must in decency provide more research evidence to back it up: it’s a bit of a long story but we’ll seek to boil it down for you . . . but first, let’s really get outrageous, let’s add a single italicized word to that statement . . . the word “deliberately” so now the statement reads this far more outrageous way:
George W. Bush saw the progressive Democrats, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and especially ACORN DELIBERATELY pushing the car (the economy) toward a 500-foot ditch and jumped into the front seat grabbing the wheel and slamming on the brakes to guide the car into the nearest friendly-looking ditch.
Can that be proven? YES, YES, YES! Here are the facts . . . .
In 1975, the State of New York just missed going bankrupt; New York City, however, was bankrupt and had to be bailed out by the federal government. What was the cause of their fiscal debacle? Eight million new recipients were added to the welfare rolls between 1968 and 1975 by the DELIBERATELY-planned actions of Richard Cloward, Frances Piven and George Wiley. There’s that word “DELIBERATELY” once again. It all began with the publication of an article by the Columbia University (NYC) progressive professors Cloward and Piven titled The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty in the May 2, 1966 edition of the leftist publication “The Nation” which came to be known as “Cloward-Piven Strategy.” Their idea: use Alinsky tactics (named after self-described Neo-Marxist Chicago community organizer Saul Alinsky author of Rules for Radicals) to overload the welfare rolls, creating a fiscal crisis and forcing (they thought) the Democratic Party to pass a GNI (guaranteed national income) in keeping with president Lyndon Johnsons “War on Poverty.” How were those new welfare recipients created? Browbeating tactics, demonstrations and outright refusal to stand up to them by the nation’s social workers . . . courtesy of the National Welfare RIGHTS Organization run by Wiley in concert with Cloward and Piven. The threesome did not get their GNI but nevertheless bragged publicly and in writing about their great “success” after the NYC bankruptcy. Cloward and Piven called upon their supporters to move their Alinsky techniques into the areas of voter registration and housing for the future. Wade Rathke, a Wiley lieutenant sent to Arkansas to run that state’s NWRO efforts in 1970, was already in place.
The future was NOT far off. The Carter administration and progressives passed CRA law and in that same year, 1977, the Arkansas Community Organization for Reform Now (ACORN) was created. We could write whole encyclopedia about ACORN’s fraudulent voter registration techniques but we’ll only mention that the supposedly non-partisan group gathered a huge number of voter registration forms in 1978 and destroyed all those belonging to would-be Republican voters. The positioning of Rathke was truly fortuitous. In 1976, Arkansas elected a 30-year old up-and-comer as their Lieutenant Governor and it was his campaign for Governor in 1978 that the fraudulent ACORN efforts benefitted. Bill Clinton was elected to the Arkansas Governorship 12 of the next 14 years and would become the first ACORN president in 1992. Meanwhile ACORN had expanded across the nation and its acronym now stood for Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now but still claiming non-partisanship and still into voter fraud as well as housing. Thanks almost entirely to ACORN’s brow-beating and shake-down tactics in Arkansas, nationwide the percentage of suspect loans doubled between 1975 and 1985 to a still reasonable 0.51%.
ACORN had delivered for Bill Clinton and now as President he showed himself willing to repay in kind. 1) In his very first year he unleashed the ACORN beast. In an infamous photo found all over the internet, Clinton signs the Motor Voter Act with Cloward and Piven standing directly behind him during the ceremony. 2) Unable to get CRA legislation, Clinton uses Presidential directive to get widespread regulatory expansion for CRA ’77. Then in 1995, Clinton out-maneuvered Newt Gingrich into allowing two minor expansions of the CRA ’77 law. By now ACORN is national and pushing for bad loans all across the country. By the end of 1995, 14% of all home loans in America are suspect and the housing bubble and housing industry bubble are fully underway.
In 1998, Clinton delivered for ACORN once again. The ’98 expansion of CRA laws put the whole ugly system on steroids. ACORN from now on will find it EASIER to get poor people with zilch credit scores into $400,000-$500,000 homes than they’d faced getting better qualified individuals into homes costing 80% less just a decade earlier. The upshot? Home lenders were forced by their government to make knowingly disastrous loans to people . . . .
a) without jobs
b) with poor credit ratings
c) without even a documented rental history
d) with only food stamps as “income”
e) with lifelong histories on Welfare
f) and even to illegal aliens
So now by 2005, 34% of all home loans were suspect loans and the debacle was clearly underway. One little detail you’ll appreciate: Barack Obama was a Chicago community organizer who worked parts of 1994-1996 as an ACORN lawyer shaking down banks and other mortgage lenders to force them to make bad loans. Obama’s signature skill was avoiding the courtroom and not only securing the home loans in question, but also was getting the lenders to make donations directly to ACORN. So let’s let you, the reader consider that word we’ve used twice: “DELIBERATELY” . . . .
So let us all contemplate the impact of those five Big Lies on our nation. On Election Day a message was sent. However, we still have the architects of the disaster running the show: Obama, Pelosi, Reid, and Barney Frank are still bigwigs in Congress. Chris Dodd was replaced by his clone Richard Blumenthal. And the 80% progressive control of the House Democratic caucus before the election now stands at 90% control by the progressive Democrats even though as a Party they lost 65 seats in the House and six seats in the senate. The people who DELIBERATELY set out to undermine our great nation are still in control of our most powerful political party and still out to “fundamentally transform” and destroy America as we know it. Vigilance and continued grassroots action by an informed and angered citizenry is the only hope. Indeed, if the contents of this article were generally known by 80% of the populace, it's hard to imagine progressive action being regarded as benignly and tolerantly as it now is . . . .
Ya’ll live long, strong and ornery,
Rajjpuut
**More details for truly ambitious readers can be found here:
http://sweetness-light.com/archive/the-many-tentacles-of-cloward-piven
I've reproduced much of that internet article here:
Inspired by the August 1965 riots in the black district of Watts in Los Angeles (which erupted after police had used batons to subdue a black man suspected of drunk driving), 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, "The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty" (which sold an unheard of 30,000 reprints) Cloward and Piven charged that the ruling classes used welfare to weaken the poor; and 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 (sic) own book of rules," Alinsky wrote in his 1972 book Rules for Radicals. When pressed to honor every word 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.
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." They would in eight years double the number on welfare via the NWRO’s bullying tactics.
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.
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. 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. Both the Living Wage and Voting Rights movements today 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.
