Does Obama intend to destroy capitalism?

Watching the Senate press last week toward passage of President Obama's universal health care, my Red Alert is forced to contemplate whether a socialist agenda is intending to bankrupt the United States with trillion-dollar social-welfare programs there is no way the country will ever be able to afford.

In "The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality," I clearly established that Barack Obama is trained in the Saul Alinsky "Rules for Radicals" methodology of lying to voters to disguise a true intent to transfer wealth from the "haves" to the "have-nots."

But as we watch President Obama expand the social-welfare state to an unprecedented level, the question is this: Is Barack Obama silently pursuing the Cloward-Piven strategy with an intent to destroy private-enterprise capitalism itself?

A central theme of "America for Sale: Fighting the New World Order, Surviving a Global Depression and Preserving USA Sovereignty" is that the nation is bankrupt, with a $65.5 trillion negative net worth and trillion-dollar deficits stretching for a decade or more ahead.

Put simply, there is no way the U.S. government can possibly honor current obligations in programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, to say nothing of the universal health care being pushed relentlessly by the Obama administration, despite continued and growing voter resistance.

Now the bond-rating agencies are warning the United States that unless trillion-dollar federal budget deficits are curtailed soon, the United States may lose a triple-A credit rating.

Could it be that President Obama intends to bankrupt the USA in order to destroy free-enterprise capitalism itself?

The only other alternative would be to charge the Obama administration and the Democrats in Congress with incompetence, arguing that somehow the president and the Democratic Party were not responsible for understanding that their unprecedented spendthrift ways would necessarily cause the United States to become economically insolvent.

The Cloward-Piven strategy

On May 2, 1966, two Columbia University sociologists, professor of social work Richard A. Cloward, and his then–research associate Frances Fox Piven, wrote a pivotal article in The Nation, articulating "a strategy to end poverty."

In what became known as the Cloward-Piven strategy, the article advocated a revolutionary approach to mobilizing the poor in a form of class warfare against capitalist forces viewed as exploiting labor and oppressing the poor.

David Horowitz, a longtime student of leftist political movements in the United States, characterized the Cloward-Piven strategy as seeking "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."

Cloward and Piven argued a "guaranteed annual income" should be established as an entitlement for the poor, a right the poor could assert and demand to be paid.

Arguing for massive registration of poor in existing social-welfare programs, Cloward and Piven sought to create a crisis that could be exploited to obtain a fundamental redistribution of power in favor of the "have-nots."

Advancing their socialist revolutionary aims, Cloward and Piven explained the crisis they sought "can occur spontaneously (e.g., riots) or as the intended result of tactics of demonstration and protest which either generate institutional disruption or bring unrecognized disruption to public attention."

The Cloward-Piven strategy sought to apply the tactics of the revolutionary civil-rights movement, including urban riots, to the poor as a whole, transcending interest-group politics defined by race to involve interest-group politics defined by class.

Radical black activist George Wiley created the National Welfare Reform Organization to implement the Cloward-Piven strategy.

Sol Stern, writing in the City Journal, noted that foot soldiers hired by the NWRO were successful in expanding welfare rolls from 4.3 million to 10.8 million by the mid-1970s, with the result that in New York City, where the strategy had been particularly successful, "one person was on the welfare rolls ... for every two working in the city's private economy."

James Simpson, a former White House staff economist and budget analyst, writing in American Thinker, argued the "vast expansion of welfare in New York City that came of the NWRO's Cloward-Piven tactics sent the city into bankruptcy in 1975."

Is President Obama intentionally placing so many on the government dole, including the inclusion of illegal aliens in Obamacare, because he wants to bankrupt the United States to destroy the private-enterprise system, following the lead of the leftist radicals that employed the Cloward-Piven strategy to bankrupt New York City in the 1970s?

ACORN, Barack Obama, and the Cloward-Piven strategy

William Rathke, the founder of ACORN, was a member of the radical Students for a Democratic Society before he dropped out of Williams College in 1968 to join the anti-draft movement protesting the Vietnam War.

He next worked for George Wiley's NWRO in Springfield, Mass., before leaving for Little Rock, Ark., in 1970, where he formed the Arkansas Community Organizations for Reform Now, an organization whose name he morphed into the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, to form a national entity.

With ACORN, Rathke resolved to apply the Cloward-Piven strategy to working as a "community organizer" in the effort to recruit radicals to register to vote, often fraudulently, as Democrats to vote in local, state and national elections.

Rathke's idea was to create a crisis in voter registration similar to the crisis in registration for welfare benefits that Cloward and Piven had initially sought to cause. Funded heavily by George Soros through his Open Society Institute, ACORN has followed a three-point strategy James Simpson described as follows:

Register as many Democratic voters as possible, legal or otherwise, and help them vote, multiple times if possible;
Overwhelm the system with fraudulent registrations using multiple entries of the same name, names of deceased and names selected at random from the phone book; and
Make the system difficult to police by lobbying for minimal identification standards required of voters arriving at polling stations to vote.

In 1992, while he was working as a community organizer in Chicago, Barack Obama headed the Chicago operations of Project Vote!, an ACORN effort to register voters nationally. In Chicago, Obama had his biggest impact registering African-American voters on Chicago's South Side.

George Soros attacks capitalism

That Barack Obama may intend to undermine the free-enterprise system itself is not so far-fetched when we consider the attack George Soros, one of candidate Obama's primary financial supporters, has launched on capitalism.

Now billionaire hedge-fund financier George Soros has decided to spend $50 million to fund a new institute designed to undermine the free-enterprise system, according to a report published last week in Newsweek.

The Soros-funded "Institute for New Economic Thinking" is designed to make research grants and fund symposiums on the need for central government control of the economy, advancing an argument from the political left that the private economy is in need of the reregulation to prevent the occurrence of another global economic recession.

The move reinforces a Democratic Party argument that the Bush administration's deregulation of the economy was the cause of the Economic Panic of 2009, even though President Bill Clinton accomplished the major regulatory reform of recent decades – namely, the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act.

In a revealing passage, Soros identifies his antipathy to George W. Bush in terms fashioned from Popper's Open Society philosophy: "When I heard President Bush say, 'Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists,' I was reminded of Nazi propaganda."

Fundamentally, Soros criticized the "Bush agenda" as being "nationalistic," too focused on pursuing narrowly defined U.S. nation-state interests. Soros was particularly vituperative toward Vice President Cheney, whom he demonized as "the power behind the throne" and characterized as working with Defense Secretary Rumsfeld to largely succeed "in imposing their views on Bush."

Asking how he came to have a position of influence on world affairs, Soros honestly admitted, "I have made a lot of money." Nor has Soros been shy about spending his money to advance his political agenda.

Since founding the Open Society Institute in 1979, Soros has spent hundreds of millions of dollars funding this flagship organization, which in turn has funneled millions to organizations dedicated to advancing causes of the political left, including MoveOn.org and the Center for American Progress.

In 2004, Soros admittedly spent several hundreds of millions of dollars in the attempt to prevent George W. Bush from winning a second term as president. Soros was an early supporter of Barack Obama, holding a fundraiser for Obama at his home and donating the maximum legal amount even before Obama was elected to the U.S. Senate. In 2006, Soros urged Obama to run for president.

When Obama declared his candidacy, Soros organized a meeting with other financiers in Soros' Wall Street office. His strong and early financial support of candidate Obama has given Soros a strong voice in the Obama White House.

Soros has offered many different proposals for overhauling the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization. Yet, always his conclusion is the same: Global financial markets require international regulation from a new generation of world-governance organizations capable of imposing global political control over global economics.