Glenn Beck: Constitution a 'niche'?
August 12, 2010
GLENN: This is from the Center For American Progress. The Center For American Progress has education cuts. We started the hour telling you about how the press is ‑‑ the press is just being, it's being gutted. I told you about the Internet today and free press and what's happening with free press and the Internet and how that is all about to change. We told you about the economic strife that is headed our way. I mean, look out, gang. You know, we showed you the mass graves here. There's something bad happening in the Middle East. There's just a lot of things that are going on, civil unrest that is beginning. Tonight on television I'm going to do two things. I want to show you the history of the Weimar Republic and specifically, specifically how it ties into what happened in Atlanta yesterday and with the Fed and what is to come. Learn from history, and you will see what is about to come our way.
The second half of the show is going after the Center of American progress and their new report on education. Now, we all know that education cuts have to be made but they don't need to be done at the federal level. They need to be done at the state level. Education needs to be controlled by the states, not the federal government. Abolish the Department of Education and let the states do it. And let the states negotiate their way out with these unions. Period. The Center For American Progress has another idea. They would like to start their cuts. They're not as broad as mine, of course. They would like to develop and cut the narrow low‑impact programs from the Department of Education. One of these low impact and narrow almost niche programs include academies for American history and civics. This is a program which provide workshops for teachers on American history. We should probably cut that. Then we the people needs to be cut. This is a program for the center for civic education to instruct students in the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights.
PAT: Yeah, what do they need to know that for? That's old. That's an old document.
GLENN: And then there's this one. Excellence in economic education. This is a grant designed to promote economic and financial literacy among K to 12 students. So let's see if we have this right. They want to cut programs in American education, in Constitution, and financial literacy. That sounds good. That sounds like a good, good plan.
PAT: That's almost as good as the plans in Arizona. They had that ‑‑ there was a big uproar. Not only did they do the immigration law but at the same time almost the legislature, they passed a law that banned education classes in Arizona to promote the overthrow of the United States government, right? Remember that? Or, or promote resentment toward a race or class of people because they had these ethnic studies in Arizona that were really focused on race‑baiting, on America's the enemy, all of those kinds of things and people went crazy: How can you cut out their ethics studies? What kind of racism is that? Well, the law apparently doesn't prohibit these classes as long as they are open to all students and don't promote ethnic resentment or solidarity. But Arizona's superintendent of public instruction, Tom Horne says the basic theme of the Mexican‑American studies program in Arizona is that Latino students were and continue to be victims of a racist American society driven by the interests of the middle and upper class whites. Among the goals listed for the Mexican‑American studies are... social justice, Latino critical race pedagogy, and they have pictures in the classroom showing the walls decorated with heroes like Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. Not a problem. Not a problem. So eliminating American history ‑‑
GLENN: I don't think there's a problem there.
PAT: ‑‑ eliminate Constitution and ‑‑
GLENN: Financial.
PAT: Financial, literacy.
GLENN: Right.
PAT: And then bring in Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and tell everybody that the whites are the problem and they are racist.
GLENN: Okay. So America, ask yourself these ‑‑ ask yourself this question. With as corrupt as our government is right now, and it is wildly corrupt ‑‑ and this isn't a Republican thing ‑‑ or, I mean, a Democrat thing. Trent Lott. Last thing we need is a bunch of Jim DeMints around there. We need to coopt them. I mean, they are about power. That's all they are about, power. And the power in Washington must be reduced, must. Not reduced. The power in Washington must be restored to its original power. How are you going to do that? How are you going to do that? How are you going to solve the financial crisis when you have Cass Sunstein and a bill that once Obama ‑‑ let's just say Obama comes in and he abolishes ‑‑ or I mean, a Republican Democrat ‑‑ I mean, a Republican congressman and it's all Republican utopia. Do you really think they are going to reverse the financial reform package? No. They will use it to their advantage. And it will continue to grow. So how are you going to, how are you going to change that? How are you going to change ethics in Washington? How are you going to change the banking problem and the ethics in banking and the ethics in business? How are you going to repair with cries of racism? And it happened with George Bush and it's happening with Barack Obama. How are you going to repair the illegal immigration problem? How are you going to repair the healthcare problem that we have? We all admit that our healthcare system is broken. It's broken. Now, how are you going to repair that? With the situation that we have with politics? How are you going to fight and keep your children when you are so busy fighting on all other fronts, when you have this nonsense being taught in schools? How are you going to fight the battle that is in your church now with social justice and collective salvation? Most people in churches aren't even aware of it now. They are not even aware of it. There are some preachers that don't even know.
I talk to some people that watch these trends. They said last election people that should know had no idea what was happening in their churches. How are you going to do that? It's the same question that people asked in the 1760s. How would you possibly separate from Britain? You can't. You can't. You can't defeat them. You can't win against them. They hold all the cards. You can't do it. The awakening that led people to understand that they have direct access to inspiration and the power of God, direct access. Not through anybody, not through any church. Direct access. And if the people restore themselves, this is 1760, 1740s they are saying this. If the American people would restore themselves to God, it will all work out. On 8/27, make sure you find out all the information at GlennBeck.com. 8/27, divine destiny at the Kennedy Center for the performing arts. It is a night of God. It is a night of how religion plays a role in the governance of this country. It's a separation of church and state. Religion and God plays a role in the individual life and then you don't need very much government because we self‑govern. We will take the words of the preachers of the 1740s to 1770 and show you what lines from sermons were taken out and used as foundation of this country and then we have members from, there's a rabbi that's going to be speaking, there is an evangelical that's going to be speaking, there's members of many faiths that are going to take those words from those sermons and translate them into today's world. There will be things that have never happened before at the Kennedy Center, I understand. We're going to talk about, turn your life over to God. That's it. Let Him work it out. Let Him work it out. And there's a difference. I want to make sure you understand this. It doesn't mean you do nothing. God helps those who help themselves, but you have to ‑‑ how did you put that just a little while ago, Pat?
PAT: Pray as if everything depends on God.
GLENN: Yes.
PAT: Act as if everything depends on you.
GLENN: Act as if everything depends on you. That's the way it is. Tickets are going to be extraordinarily limited. Right now if you go to the Kennedy Center, it will be first come first serve. There are 2500 seats but a lot of those are going to be taken up by people that I don't want to announce because it will just drive people crazy and there's no reason to do that. You’ll find out who they are and I'll tell you on 8/27. This is kind of an appetizer for 8/28. And then buckle up, gang, because at the feet of the Lincoln Memorial at 10:00 two weeks from Saturday, miracles happen. Miracles happen. And not on the stage but with the number of people, whether it's 200,000 or 20,000. Miracles will happen in the crowd around the reflecting pool at the Lincoln Memorial. Join me there. 8/28.
see the complete article by Glenn Beck
Saturday, August 14, 2010
SE Cupp ....... Losing Our Religion
SE Cupp .......
About the Author
S.E. CUPP is a regular guest commentator on MSNBC, CNN, C-SPAN, and Fox News Channel programs including Hannity, Larry King Live, The Joy Behar Show, Red Eye with Greg Gutfeld, Geraldo and Reliable Sources. A nationally published political columnist and culture critic, she is currently an online columnist for the New York Daily News and senior writer at The Daily Caller. She coauthored Why You're Wrong About the Right with Brett Joshpe.
Losing Our Religion: The Liberal Media's Attack on Christianity
About the Author
S.E. CUPP is a regular guest commentator on MSNBC, CNN, C-SPAN, and Fox News Channel programs including Hannity, Larry King Live, The Joy Behar Show, Red Eye with Greg Gutfeld, Geraldo and Reliable Sources. A nationally published political columnist and culture critic, she is currently an online columnist for the New York Daily News and senior writer at The Daily Caller. She coauthored Why You're Wrong About the Right with Brett Joshpe.
Losing Our Religion: The Liberal Media's Attack on Christianity
Friday, August 13, 2010
Amity Shlaes and her book: The Forgotten Man
Its duration and depth made the Depression "Great," and Shlaes, a prominent conservative economics journalist, considers why a decade of government intervention ameliorated but never tamed it. With vitality uncommon for an economics history, Shlaes chronicles the projects of Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt as well as these projects' effect on those who paid for them. Reminding readers that the reputedly do-nothing Hoover pulled hard on the fiscal levers (raising tariffs, increasing government spending), Shlaes nevertheless emphasizes that his enthusiasm for intervention paled against the ebullient FDR's glee in experimentation. She focuses closely on the influence of his fabled Brain Trust, her narrative shifting among Raymond Moley, Rexford Tugwell, and other prominent New Dealers. Businesses that litigated their resistance to New Deal regulations attract Shlaes' attention, as do individuals who coped with the despair of the 1930s through self-help, such as Alcoholics Anonymous cofounder Bill Wilson. The book culminates in the rise of Wendell Willkie, and Shlaes' accent on personalities is an appealing avenue into her skeptical critique of the New Deal. Gilbert Taylor
as seen on the Glenn beck show
The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression
Catholics come home
Catholics come home
Welcome to Catholics Come Home. We’re here to help you begin or continue your faith journey, so you can find true peace, happiness and purpose in life.
At Catholics Come Home, we are dedicated to presenting the honest truth about even very difficult subjects. We want to share with you the beautiful, historical and miraculous aspects of the Catholic Church. People who have taken the time to explore our site are surprised to find out that there is much more to Catholicism than they ever realized.
vist the Catholics Come Home web site
new tv advetising campaign to reach out to inactive / dormant Catholics?
www.catholicscomehome.org
Welcome to Catholics Come Home. We’re here to help you begin or continue your faith journey, so you can find true peace, happiness and purpose in life.
At Catholics Come Home, we are dedicated to presenting the honest truth about even very difficult subjects. We want to share with you the beautiful, historical and miraculous aspects of the Catholic Church. People who have taken the time to explore our site are surprised to find out that there is much more to Catholicism than they ever realized.
vist the Catholics Come Home web site
new tv advetising campaign to reach out to inactive / dormant Catholics?
www.catholicscomehome.org
Thursday, August 12, 2010
I Can Stalk U web site and info
I Can Stalk U
Raising awareness about inadvertent information sharing
see http://icanstalku.com/
see more info on
Raising awareness about inadvertent information sharing
see http://icanstalku.com/
see more info on
Blog on narco activity in Mexico
Weimar Republic as discussed on Glenn Beck show
Born out of national defeat in 1918, the Weimar Republic launched Germany on an experiment in modernity under the least propitious circumstances. In an outstanding scholarly study that is likely to spark controversy, late German historian Peukert ( Inside Nazi Germany ) claims that the distinctive national characteristics of German history and of Weimar do not all point in a direct line to the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. Weimar's fragile attempt at democracy, he contends, was destroyed by a steady retreat from political compromise and by a continuous shrinking of the material and economic base, which prevented the liberal government, with its welfare structure, from gaining real legitimacy in the eyes of the German people. Interpreting Weimar as a brief, headlong tour of the fateful choices made possible by the modern world, this rigorous history explores the paradox of a society that spawned avant-garde cultural breakthroughs amid bleak poverty and political breakdown.
The Weimar Republic
Obama is the worst president in history
Is President Obama the "worst president in history"? That's what the son of former Vice President Dan Quayle claims in a new TV ad aimed at boosting his congressional bid in Arizona.
Ben Quayle, running for the GOP nomination in the state's 3rd Congressional District, speaks directly to the camera in the spot, which began airing in the Phoenix area Wednesday. "Barack Obama is the worst president in history," Quayle says in the ad's opening seconds. Because of Obama, the 33-year-old says, "my generation will inherit a weakened country."
Citing "drug cartels in Mexico" and "in D.C.," Quayle asks, "What's happened to America?" He goes on to ask voters to send him to Congress. "I love Arizona. I was raised right," he says. "Somebody has to go to Washington and knock the hell out of the place." You can watch the ad after the jump.
click to read about Obama the worst president in history
Ben Quayle, running for the GOP nomination in the state's 3rd Congressional District, speaks directly to the camera in the spot, which began airing in the Phoenix area Wednesday. "Barack Obama is the worst president in history," Quayle says in the ad's opening seconds. Because of Obama, the 33-year-old says, "my generation will inherit a weakened country."
Citing "drug cartels in Mexico" and "in D.C.," Quayle asks, "What's happened to America?" He goes on to ask voters to send him to Congress. "I love Arizona. I was raised right," he says. "Somebody has to go to Washington and knock the hell out of the place." You can watch the ad after the jump.
click to read about Obama the worst president in history
is Fannie Mae stilling bleeding your tax dollars ?
Fannie Mae Asks for $1.5 Billion as Feds Review Mortgage Overhaul
see more on Fannie May
Read more: http://www.thirdage.com/news/fannie-mae-asks-15-billion-feds-review-mortgage-overhaul_8-9-2010#ixzz0wPXL5100
see more on Fannie May
Read more: http://www.thirdage.com/news/fannie-mae-asks-15-billion-feds-review-mortgage-overhaul_8-9-2010#ixzz0wPXL5100
Voodoo in Obama’s White House
Kristen Atkinson, a blogger over at the Townhall website, has posted an article claiming Marian Robinson, the 72-year old first grandmother who lives at the White House, is practicing Santería, otherwise known as voodoo. A close friend of Michelle Obama says the president became furious at his mother-in-law.
Obama may be outraged by a voodoo priestess chanting in the White House, but paganism at the highest levels of government is nothing new.
According to Atkinson, Marian Robinson became increasingly frustrated as her husband, Fraser Robinson, was hobbled by multiple sclerosis in the late 1980s, and turned to “Santeria in a desperate hope” to cure him. “Michelle put her foot down when she heard that her mother took her dad to ceremonies where they did spells and trances, and sacrificed animals, chickens and goats I think. But Marian was desperate and kept going anyway, even when her husband was to sick to go with her. I don’t think the president knew anything about this earlier because it was before they met. Michelle and Craig (her brother) wanted to close the book on this and never talked about it again after their father died in 1991.”
voodoo in obamas white house click to read on Obama voodoo
A CONTRACT WITH AMERICA FOR 2010
A CONTRACT WITH AMERICA FOR 2010
By DICK MORRIS
My observations from the campaign trail are that this year's elections will be a total and complete disaster for the Democratic Party. In fact, it will amount to the obliteration of an entire generation of Democratic officeholders. It will become very rare to find a youngish baby boomer white Democrat in elective office in the United States. I believe that almost half of the white Democratic congressmen who are seeking reelection will lose!
A wipeout of this magnitude cannot be explained, alone, by Obama's ratings or his policies. He has fallen sharply since he took office, but even ratings in the 40s do not explain this type of result. It is increasingly obvious that Congress has earned much of this disaster by itself, quite unrelated to Obama. The vision of the deal-making that accompanied healthcare was too disgusting for the average American to stomach. And now the failure of the Congress to expel Reps. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) and Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) underscores its inability to police itself.
But Republicans need to remember that when they lost the House in 2006, about 5 percent of their incumbents were under indictment, convicted or in prison, or resigned. Washington has always been the crime capital of America, but the House of Representatives was its highest crime-rate neighborhood!
Republicans should embrace specific ethical reforms, which they should showcase in their campaign advertising in 2010. These positive ads will do as much as any good negative to underscore the difference between a Republican challenger and a Democratic incumbent.
The reforms should include:
• The establishment of an office of special prosecutor for Congress, with its head appointed by the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court for a fixed term. The office should have subpoena power, a well-funded staff and the right to convene grand juries and issue indictments. Self-policing by ethics committees obviously does not work.
• All earmarking should be banned. Congress cannot be trusted with this power.
• A ban on spouses of members of Congress serving on boards or accepting employment by any company or organization that receives federal funds. In cases like Mrs. Chris Dodd and Mrs. Evan Bayh, corporate board employment was a way for special interests to influence their husbands and pad the family checkbook.
• A ban on families of members of Congress serving as lobbyists.
• No free travel, whether sponsored by foundations or lobbyists. Only government trips on official business -- real business -- should be allowed.
• Full disclosure of the precise amounts of members' net worth, debts, investments and holdings, including home mortgages.
• Full publication, online, of all committee votes.
• No student loan repayments for congressional staffers.
• A five-year ban on lobbying for members of Congress or their staffs after leaving office. The ban should also apply to employment by a company that performs lobbying services.
• If a senator or congressman is absent more than 10 percent of the time for reasons other than illness -- including running for president -- his pay should be docked proportionately.
• Term limits for congressional staffers. No staff member of Congress should be permitted to serve in a job that pays above $100,000 a year for more than eight years. If we can't get term limits for Congress, let's at least clean out the professional staffers!
A smart candidate in 2010 will take elements of these proposals -- particularly the special prosecutor -- and put them in his or her campaign ads. Cashing in on Obama's unpopularity and his failed agenda is only half the battle. Capitalizing on the dismal state of congressional ethics is the other part!
RED SKY IN THE MORNING: CIC agents thought they were communist spies. The Philippine constabulary just wanted them dead. Two men made it out alive - one didn't.
By DICK MORRIS
My observations from the campaign trail are that this year's elections will be a total and complete disaster for the Democratic Party. In fact, it will amount to the obliteration of an entire generation of Democratic officeholders. It will become very rare to find a youngish baby boomer white Democrat in elective office in the United States. I believe that almost half of the white Democratic congressmen who are seeking reelection will lose!
A wipeout of this magnitude cannot be explained, alone, by Obama's ratings or his policies. He has fallen sharply since he took office, but even ratings in the 40s do not explain this type of result. It is increasingly obvious that Congress has earned much of this disaster by itself, quite unrelated to Obama. The vision of the deal-making that accompanied healthcare was too disgusting for the average American to stomach. And now the failure of the Congress to expel Reps. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) and Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) underscores its inability to police itself.
But Republicans need to remember that when they lost the House in 2006, about 5 percent of their incumbents were under indictment, convicted or in prison, or resigned. Washington has always been the crime capital of America, but the House of Representatives was its highest crime-rate neighborhood!
Republicans should embrace specific ethical reforms, which they should showcase in their campaign advertising in 2010. These positive ads will do as much as any good negative to underscore the difference between a Republican challenger and a Democratic incumbent.
The reforms should include:
• The establishment of an office of special prosecutor for Congress, with its head appointed by the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court for a fixed term. The office should have subpoena power, a well-funded staff and the right to convene grand juries and issue indictments. Self-policing by ethics committees obviously does not work.
• All earmarking should be banned. Congress cannot be trusted with this power.
• A ban on spouses of members of Congress serving on boards or accepting employment by any company or organization that receives federal funds. In cases like Mrs. Chris Dodd and Mrs. Evan Bayh, corporate board employment was a way for special interests to influence their husbands and pad the family checkbook.
• A ban on families of members of Congress serving as lobbyists.
• No free travel, whether sponsored by foundations or lobbyists. Only government trips on official business -- real business -- should be allowed.
• Full disclosure of the precise amounts of members' net worth, debts, investments and holdings, including home mortgages.
• Full publication, online, of all committee votes.
• No student loan repayments for congressional staffers.
• A five-year ban on lobbying for members of Congress or their staffs after leaving office. The ban should also apply to employment by a company that performs lobbying services.
• If a senator or congressman is absent more than 10 percent of the time for reasons other than illness -- including running for president -- his pay should be docked proportionately.
• Term limits for congressional staffers. No staff member of Congress should be permitted to serve in a job that pays above $100,000 a year for more than eight years. If we can't get term limits for Congress, let's at least clean out the professional staffers!
A smart candidate in 2010 will take elements of these proposals -- particularly the special prosecutor -- and put them in his or her campaign ads. Cashing in on Obama's unpopularity and his failed agenda is only half the battle. Capitalizing on the dismal state of congressional ethics is the other part!
RED SKY IN THE MORNING: CIC agents thought they were communist spies. The Philippine constabulary just wanted them dead. Two men made it out alive - one didn't.
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Buuckner on business links his web site
visit his actual site as mentioned on Glenn Beck show
ask him a question at
http://www.buckneronbusiness.com/blog/contact/
http://www.buckneronbusiness.com
ask him a question at
http://www.buckneronbusiness.com/blog/contact/
http://www.buckneronbusiness.com
who is George Soros and why is he trying to harm America?
In 1979 Soros established the Open Society Institute (OSI), which serves as the flagship of a network of Soros foundations that donate tens of millions of dollars each year to a wide array of individuals and organizations that share the founder's agendas. Those agendas can be summarized as follows:
promoting the view that America is institutionally an oppressive nation
promoting the election of leftist political candidates throughout the United States
opposing virtually all post-9/11 national security measures enacted by U.S. government, particularly the Patriot Act
depicting American military actions as unjust, unwarranted, and immoral
promoting open borders, mass immigration, and a watering down of current immigration laws
promoting a dramatic expansion of social welfare programs funded by ever-escalating taxes
promoting social welfare benefits and amnesty for illegal aliens
defending the civil rights and liberties of suspected anti-American terrorists and their abetters
financing the recruitment and training of future activist leaders of the political Left
advocating America's unilateral disarmament and/or a steep reduction in its military spending
opposing the death penalty in all circumstances
promoting socialized medicine in the United States
promoting the tenets of radical environmentalism, whose ultimate goal, as writer Michael Berliner has explained, is "not clean air and clean water, [but] rather ... the demolition of technological/industrial civilization"
bringing American foreign policy under the control of the United Nations
promoting racial and ethnic preferences in academia and the business world alike
promoting taxpayer-funded abortion-on-demand
advocating stricter gun-control measures
advocating the legalization of marijuana
see more at
www.discoverthenetworks.org
promoting the view that America is institutionally an oppressive nation
promoting the election of leftist political candidates throughout the United States
opposing virtually all post-9/11 national security measures enacted by U.S. government, particularly the Patriot Act
depicting American military actions as unjust, unwarranted, and immoral
promoting open borders, mass immigration, and a watering down of current immigration laws
promoting a dramatic expansion of social welfare programs funded by ever-escalating taxes
promoting social welfare benefits and amnesty for illegal aliens
defending the civil rights and liberties of suspected anti-American terrorists and their abetters
financing the recruitment and training of future activist leaders of the political Left
advocating America's unilateral disarmament and/or a steep reduction in its military spending
opposing the death penalty in all circumstances
promoting socialized medicine in the United States
promoting the tenets of radical environmentalism, whose ultimate goal, as writer Michael Berliner has explained, is "not clean air and clean water, [but] rather ... the demolition of technological/industrial civilization"
bringing American foreign policy under the control of the United Nations
promoting racial and ethnic preferences in academia and the business world alike
promoting taxpayer-funded abortion-on-demand
advocating stricter gun-control measures
advocating the legalization of marijuana
see more at
www.discoverthenetworks.org
more voodoo economic numbers from Obama and comrades?
more voodoo economic numbers from Obama and comrades?
I can't believe and his team can generate all these new usual bogus numbers to justify thier spending.
Obama justifies the bailout of a few states by reducing food stamps for the year 2014.
what is this numberic / math bullshit?
I can't believe and his team can generate all these new usual bogus numbers to justify thier spending.
Obama justifies the bailout of a few states by reducing food stamps for the year 2014.
what is this numberic / math bullshit?
The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty
The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty
by Richard A. Cloward and Frances Fox Piven
How can the poor be organized to press for relief from poverty? How can a broad-based movement be developed and the current disarray of activist forces be halted? These questions confront, and confound, activists today. It is our purpose to advance a strategy which affords the basis for a convergence of civil rights organizations, militant anti-poverty groups and the poor. If this strategy were implemented, a political crisis would result that could lead to legislation for a guaranteed annual income and thus an end to poverty.
The strategy is based on the fact that a vast discrepancy exists between the benefits to which people are entitled under public welfare programs and the sums which they actually receive. This gulf is not recognized in a society that is wholly and self-righteously oriented toward getting people off the welfare rolls. It is widely known, for example, that nearly 8 million persons (half of them white) now subsist on welfare, but it is not generally known that for every person on the rolls at least one more probably meets existing criteria of eligibility but is not obtaining assistance.
The discrepancy is not an accident stemming from bureaucratic inefficiency; rather, it is an integral feature of the welfare system which, if challenged, would precipitate a profound financial and political crisis. The force for that challenge, and the strategy we propose, is a massive drive to recruit the poor onto the welfare rolls.
The distribution of public assistance has been a local and state responsibility, and that accounts in large part for the abysmal character of welfare practices. Despite the growing involvement of federal agencies in supervisory and reimbursement arrangements, state and local community forces are still decisive. The poor are most visible and proximate in the local community; antagonism toward them (and toward the agencies which are implicated with them) has always, therefore, been more intense locally than at the federal level. In recent years, local communities have increasingly felt class and ethnic friction generated by competition for neighborhoods, schools, jobs and political power. Public welfare systems are under the constant stress of conflict and opposition, made only sharper by the rising costs to localities of public aid. And, to accommodate this pressure, welfare practice everywhere has become more restrictive than welfare statute; much of the time it verges on lawlessness. Thus, public welfare systems try to keep their budgets down and their rolls low by failing to inform people of the rights available to them; by intimidating and shaming them to the degree that they are reluctant either to apply or to press claims, and by arbitrarily denying benefits to those who are eligible.
A series of welfare drives in large cities would, we believe, impel action on a new federal program to distribute income, eliminating the present public welfare system and alleviating the abject poverty which it perpetrates. Widespread campaigns to register the eligible poor for welfare aid, and to help existing recipients obtain their full benefits, would produce bureaucratic disruption in welfare agencies and fiscal disruption in local and state governments. These disruptions would generate severe political strains, and deepen existing divisions among elements in the big-city Democratic coalition: the remaining white middle class, the white working-class ethnic groups and the growing minority poor. To avoid a further weakening of that historic coalition, a national Democratic administration would be con-strained to advance a federal solution to poverty that would override local welfare failures, local class and racial conflicts and local revenue dilemmas. By the internal disruption of local bureaucratic practices, by the furor over public welfare poverty, and by the collapse of current financing arrangements, powerful forces can be generated for major economic reforms at the national level.
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. Instead, programs are demanded to enable people to become economically competitive. But such programs are of no use to millions of today's poor. For example, one-third of the 35 million poor Americans are in families headed by females; these heads of family cannot be aided appreciably by job retraining, higher minimum wages, accelerated rates of economic growth, or employment in public works projects. Nor can the 5 million aged who are poor, nor those whose poverty results from the ill health of the wage earner. Programs to enhance individual mobility will chiefly benefit the very young, if not the as yet unborn. Individual mobility is no answer to the question of how to abolish the massive problem of poverty now.
It has never been the full answer. If many people in the past have found their way up from poverty by the path of individual mobility, many others have taken a different route. Organized labor stands out as a major example. Although many American workers never yielded their dreams of individual achievement, they accepted and practiced the principle that each can benefit only as the status of workers as a whole is elevated. They bargained for collective mobility, not for individual mobility; to promote their fortunes in the aggregate, not to promote the prospects of one worker over another. And if each finally found himself in the same relative economic relationship to his fellows as when he began, it was nevertheless clear that all were infinitely better off. That fact has sustained the labor movement in the face of a counter pull from the ideal of individual achievement.
But many of the contemporary poor will not rise from poverty by organizing to bargain collectively. They either are not in the labor force or are In such marginal and dispersed occupations (e.g., domestic servants) that it is extremely difficult to organize them. Compared with other groups, then, many of today's poor cannot secure a redistribution of income by organizing within the institution of private enterprise. A federal program of income redistribution has become necessary to elevate the poor en masse from poverty.
Several ways have been proposed for redistributing income through the federal government. It is not our purpose here to assess the relative merits of these plans, which are still undergoing debate and clarification. Whatever mechanism is eventually adopted, however, it must include certain features if it is not merely to perpetuate in a new guise the present evils of the public welfare system.
First, adequate levels of income must be assured. (Public welfare levels are astonishingly low; indeed, states typically define a "minimum" standard of living and then grant only a percentage of it, so that families are held well below what the government itself officially defines as the poverty level.) Furthermore, income should be distributed without requiring that recipients first divest themselves of their assets, as public welfare now does, thereby pauperizing families as a condition of sustenance.
Second, the right to income must be guaranteed, or the oppression of the welfare poor will not be eliminated. Because benefits are conditional under the present public welfare system, submission to arbitrary governmental power is regularly made the price of sustenance. People have been coerced into attending literacy classes or participating in medical or vocational rehabilitation regimes, on pain of having their benefits terminated. Men are forced into labor on virtually any terms lest they forfeit their welfare aid. One can prize literacy, health and work, while still vigorously opposing the right of government to compel compliance with these values.
Conditional benefits thus result in violations of civil liberties throughout the nation, and in a pervasive oppression of the poor. And these violations are not less real because the impulse leading to them is altruistic and the agency is professional. If new systems of income distribution continue to permit the professional bureaucracies to choose when to give and when to withhold financial relief, the poor will once again be surrendered to an arrangement in which their rights are diminished in the name of overcoming their vices. Those who lead an attack on the welfare system must therefore be alert to the pitfalls of inadequate but placating reforms which give the appearance of victory to what is in truth defeat.
How much economic force can be mobilized by this strategy? This question is not easy to answer because few studies have been conducted of people who are not receiving public assistance even though they may be eligible. For the purposes of this presentation, a few facts about New York City may be suggestive. Since practices elsewhere are generally acknowledged to be even more restrictive, the estimates of unused benefits which follow probably yield a conservative estimate of the potential force of the strategy set forth in this article.
Basic assistance for food and rent: The most striking characteristic of public welfare practice is that a great many people who appear to be eligible for assistance are not on the welfare rolls. The average monthly total of New York City residents receiving assistance in 1959 was 325,771, but according to the 1960 census. 716,000 persons (unrelated or in families) appeared to be subsisting on incomes at or below the prevailing welfare eligibility levels (e.g $2,070 for a family of four). In that same year, 539,000 people subsisted on incomes less than 80 per cent of the welfare minimums, and 200,000 lived alone or in families on incomes reported to be less than half of eligibility levels. Thus it appears that for every person on welfare in 1959, at least one more was eligible.
The results of two surveys of selected areas in Manhattan support the contention that many people subsist on incomes below welfare eligibility levels. One of these, conducted by Greenleigh Associates in 1964 in an urban-renewal area on New York's upper West Side, found 9 per cent of those not on the rolls were in such acute need that they appeared to qualify for emergency assistance. The study showed, further, that a substantial number of families that were not in a "critical" condition would probably have qualified for supplemental assistance.
The other survey, conducted in 1961 by Mobilization for Youth, had similar findings. The area from which its sample was drawn, 67 square blocks on the lower East Side, is a poor one, but by no means the poorest in New York City. Yet 13 per cent of the total sample who were not on the welfare rolls reported incomes falling below the prevailing welfare schedules for food and rent.
There is no reason to suppose that the discrepancy between those eligible for and those receiving assistance has narrowed much in the past few years. The welfare rolls have gone up, to be sure, but so have eligibility levels. Since the economic circumstances of impoverished groups in New York have not improved appreciably in the past few years, each such rise increases the number of people who are potentially eligible for some degree of assistance.
Even if one allows for the possibility that family-income figures are grossly underestimated by the census, the financial implications of the proposed strategy are still very great. In 1965, the monthly average of persons receiving cash assistance in New York was 490,000, at a total cost of $440 million; the rolls have now risen above 500,000, so that costs will exceed $500 million in 1966. An increase in the rolls of a mere 20 per cent would cost an already overburdened municipality some $100 million.
Special grants: Public assistance recipients in New York are also entitled to receive "nonrecurring" grants for clothing, household equipment and furniture-including washing machines, refrigerators, beds and bedding, tables and chairs. It hardly needs to be noted that most impoverished families have grossly inadequate clothing and household furnishings. The Greenleigh study, for example, found that 52 per cent of the families on public assistance lacked anything approaching adequate furniture. This condition results because almost nothing is spent on special grants in New York. In October, 1965, a typical month, the Department of Welfare spent only $2.50 per recipient for heavy clothing and $1.30 for household furnishings. Taken together, grants of this kind amounted in 1965 to a mere $40 per person, or a total of $20 million for the entire year. Considering the real needs of families, the successful demand for full entitlements could multiply these expenditures tenfold or more and that would involve the disbursement of many millions of dollars indeed.
One must be cautious in making generalizations about the prospects for this strategy in any jurisdiction unless the structure of welfare practices has been examined in some detail. We can, however, cite other studies conducted in other places to show that New York practices are not atypical. In Detroit, for example, Greenleigh Associates studied a large sample of households in a low-income district in 1965. Twenty per cent were already receiving assistance, but 35 per cent more were judged to need it. Although the authors made no strict determination of the eligibility of these families under the laws of Michigan, they believed that "larger numbers of persons were eligible than receiving." A good many of these families did not know that public assistance was available; others thought they would be deemed ineligible; not a few were ashamed or afraid to ask.
Similar deprivations have been shown in nation-wide studies. In 1963, the federal government carried out a survey based on a national sample of 5,500 families whose benefits under Aid to Dependent Children had been terminated. Thirty-four per cent of these cases were officially in need of income at the point of closing: this was true of 30 per cent of the white and 44 per cent of the Negro cases. The chief basis for termination given in local department records was "other reasons" (i.e., other than improvement in financial condition, which would make dependence on welfare unnecessary). Upon closer examination, these "other reasons" turned out to be "unsuitable home" (i.e., the presence of illegitimate children), "failure to comply with departmental regulations'' or "refusal to take legal action against a putative father." (Negroes were especially singled out for punitive action on the ground that children were not being maintained in "suitable homes.") The amounts of money that people are deprived of by these injustices are very great.
In order to generate a crisis, the poor must obtain benefits which they have forfeited. Until now, they have been inhibited from asserting claims by self-protective devices within the welfare system: its capacity to limit information, to intimidate applicants, to demoralize recipients, and arbitrarily to deny lawful claims.
Ignorance of welfare rights can be attacked through a massive educational campaign Brochures describing benefits in simple, clear language, and urging people to seek their full entitlements, should be distributed door to door in tenements and public housing projects, and deposited in stores, schools, churches and civic centers. Advertisements should be placed in newspapers; spot announcements should be made on radio. Leaders of social, religious, fraternal and political groups in the slums should also be enlisted to recruit the eligible to the rolls. The fact that the campaign is intended to inform people of their legal rights under a government program, that it is a civic education drive, will lend it legitimacy.
But information alone will not suffice. Organizers will have to become advocates in order to deal effectively with improper rejections and terminations. The advocate's task is to appraise the circumstances of each case, to argue its merits before welfare, to threaten legal action if satisfaction is not given. In some cases, it will be necessary to contest decisions by requesting a "fair hearing" before the appropriate state supervisory agency; it may occasionally be necessary to sue for redress in the courts. Hearings and court actions will require lawyers, many of whom, in cities like New York, can be recruited on a voluntary basis, especially under the banner of a movement to end poverty by a strategy of asserting legal rights. However, most cases will not require an expert knowledge of law, but only of welfare regulations; the rules can be learned by laymen, including welfare recipients themselves (who can help to man "information and advocacy" centers). To aid workers in these centers, handbooks should be prepared describing welfare rights and the tactics to employ in claiming them.
Advocacy must be supplemented by organized demonstrations to create a climate of militancy that will overcome the invidious and immobilizing attitudes which many potential recipients hold toward being "on welfare." In such a climate, many more poor people are likely to become their own advocates and will not need to rely on aid from organizers.
As the crisis develops, it will be important to use the mass media to inform the broader liberal community about the inefficiencies and injustices of welfare. For example, the system will not be able to process many new applicants because of cumbersome and often unconstitutional investigatory procedures (which cost 20c for every dollar disbursed). As delays mount, so should the public demand that a simplified affidavit supplant these procedures, so that the poor may certify to their condition. If the system reacts by making the proof of eligibility more difficult, the demand should be made that the Department of Health, Education and Welfare dispatch "eligibility registrars" to enforce federal statutes governing local programs. And throughout the crisis, the mass media should be used to advance arguments for a new federal income distribution program.
Although new resources in organizers and funds would have to be developed to mount this campaign, a variety of conventional agencies in the large cities could also be drawn upon for help. The idea of "welfare rights" has begun to attract attention in many liberal circles. A number of organizations, partly under the aegis of the "war against poverty," are developing information and advocacy services for low-income people [see "Poverty, Injustice and the Welfare State" by Richard A. Cloward and Richard M. Elman, The Nation, issues of February 28, 1966 and March 7, 1966]. It is not likely that these organizations will directly participate in the present strategy, for obvious political reasons. But whether they participate or not, they constitute a growing network of resources to which people can be referred for help in establishing and maintaining entitlements. In the final analysis, it does not matter who helps people to get on the rolls or to get additional entitlements, so long as the job is done.
Since this plan deals with problems of great immediacy In the lives of the poor, it should motivate some of them to involve themselves in regular organizational activities. Welfare recipients, chiefly ADC mothers, are already forming federations, committees and councils in cities across the nation; in Boston, New York, Newark, Cleveland, Chicago, Detroit and Los Angeles, to mention a few. Such groups typically focus on obtaining full entitlements for existing recipients rather than on recruiting new recipients, and they do not yet comprise a national movement. But their very existence attests to a growing readiness among ghetto residents to act against public welfare.
To generate an expressly political movement, cadres of aggressive organizers would have to come from the civil rights movement and the churches, from militant low-income organizations like those formed by the Industrial Areas Foundation (that is, by Saul Alinsky), and from other groups on the Left. These activists should be quick to see the difference between programs to redress individual grievances and a large-scale social-action campaign for national policy reform.
Movements that depend on involving masses of poor people have generally failed in America. Why would the proposed strategy to engage the poor succeed?
First, this plan promises immediate economic benefits. This is a point of some importance because, whereas America's poor have not been moved in any number by radical political ideologies, they have sometimes been moved by their economic interests. Since radical movements in America have rarely been able to provide visible economic incentives, they have usually failed to secure mass participation of any kind. The conservative "business unionism" of organized labor is explained by this fact, for membership enlarged only as unionism paid off in material benefits. Union leaders have understood that their strength derives almost entirely from their capacity to provide economic rewards to members. Although leaders have increasingly acted in political spheres, their influence has been directed chiefly to matters of governmental policy affecting the well-being of organized workers. The same point is made by the experience of rent strikes in Northern cities. Their organizers were often motivated by radical ideologies, but tenants have been attracted by the promise that housing improvements would quickly be made if they withheld their rent.
Second, for this strategy to succeed, one need not ask more of most of the poor than that they claim lawful benefits. Thus the plan has the extraordinary capability of yielding mass influence without mass participation, at least as the term "participation" is ordinarily understood. Mass influence in this case stems from the consumption of benefits and does not require that large groups of people be involved in regular organizational roles.
Moreover, this kind of mass influence is cumulative because benefits are continuous. Once eligibility for basic food and rent grants is established, the dram on local resources persists indefinitely. Other movements have failed precisely because they could not produce continuous and cumulative influence. In the Northern rent strikes, for example, tenant participation depended largely on immediate grievances; as soon as landlords made the most minimal repairs, participation fell away and with it the impact of the movement. Efforts to revive tenant participation by organizing demonstrations around broader housing issues (e.g., the expansion of public housing) did not succeed because the incentives were not immediate.
Third, the prospects for mass influence are enhanced because this plan provides a practical basis for coalition between poor whites and poor Negroes. Advocates of low-income movements have not been able to suggest how poor whites and poor Negroes can be united in an expressly lower-class movement. Despite pleas of some Negro leaders for joint action on programs requiring integration, poor whites have steadfastly resisted making common cause with poor Negroes. By contrast, the benefits of the present plan are as great for whites as for Negroes. In the big cities, at least, it does not seem likely that poor whites, whatever their prejudices against either Negroes or public welfare, will refuse to participate when Negroes aggressively claim benefits that are unlawfully denied to them as well. One salutary consequence of public information campaigns to acquaint Negroes with their rights is that many whites will be made aware of theirs. Even if whites prefer to work through their own organizations and leaders, the consequences will be equivalent to joining with Negroes. For if the object is to focus attention on the need for new economic measures by producing a crisis over the dole, anyone who insists upon extracting maximum benefits from public welfare is in effect part of a coalition and is contributing to the cause.
The ultimate aim of this strategy is a new program for direct income distribution. What reason is there to expect that the federal government will enact such legislation in response to a crisis in the welfare system?
We ordinarily think of major legislation as taking form only through established electoral processes. We tend to overlook the force of crisis in precipitating legislative reform, partly because we lack a theoretical framework by which to understand the impact of major disruptions.
By crisis, we mean a publicly visible disruption in some institutional sphere. Crisis 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. Public trouble is a political liability, it calls for action by political leaders to stabilize the situation. Because crisis usually creates or exposes conflict, it threatens to produce cleavages in a political consensus which politicians will ordinarily act to avert.
Although crisis impels political action, it does not itself determine the selection of specific solutions. Political leaders will try to respond with proposals which work to their advantage in the electoral process. Unless group cleavages form around issues and demands, the politician has great latitude and tends to proffer only the minimum action required to quell disturbances without risking existing electoral support. Spontaneous disruptions, such as riots, rarely produce leaders who articulate demands; thus no terms are imposed, and political leaders are permitted to respond in ways that merely restore a semblance of stability without offending other groups in a coalition.
When, however, a crisis is defined by its participants--or by other activated groups--as a matter of clear issues and preferred solutions, terms are imposed on the politicians' bid for their support. Whether political leaders then design solutions to reflect these terms depends on a twofold calculation: first, the impact of the crisis and the issues it raises on existing alignments and, second, the gains or losses in support to be expected as a result of a proposed resolution.
As to the impact on existing alignments, issues exposed by a crisis may activate new groups, thus altering the balance of support and opposition on the issues; or it may polarize group sentiments, altering the terms which must be offered to insure the support of given constituent groups. In framing resolutions, politicians are more responsive to group shifts and are more likely to accommodate to the terms imposed when electoral coalitions threatened by crisis are already uncertain or weakening. In other words, the politician responds to group demands, not only by calculating the magnitude of electoral gains and losses, but by assessing the impact of the resolution on the stability of existing or potential coalitions. Political leaders are especially responsive to group shifts when the terms of settlement can be framed so as to shore up an existing coalition, or as a basis for the development of new and more stable alignments, without jeopardizing existing support. Then, indeed, the calculation of net gain is most secure.
The legislative reforms of the depression years, for example, were impelled not so much by organized interests exercised through regular electoral processes as by widespread economic crisis. That crisis precipitated the disruption of the regionally based coalitions underlying the old national parties. During the realignments of 1932, a new Democratic coalition was formed, based heavily on urban working-class groups. Once in power, the national Democratic leadership proposed and implemented the economic reforms of the New Deal. Although these measures were a response to the imperative of economic crisis, the types of measures enacted were designed to secure and stabilize the new Democratic coalition.
The civil rights movement, to take a recent case, also reveals the relationship of crisis and electoral conditions in producing legislative reform. The crisis in the South took place in the context of a weakening North-South Democratic coalition. The strains in that coalition were first evident in the Dixiecrat desertion of 1948, and continued through the Eisenhower years as the Republicans gained ground in the Southern states. Democratic party leaders at first tried to hold the dissident South by warding off the demands of enlarging Negro constituencies in Northern cities. Thus for two decades the national Democratic Party campaigned on strongly worded civil rights planks but enacted only token measures. The civil rights movement forced the Democrats' hand: a crumbling Southern partnership was forfeited, and major civil rights legislation was put forward, designed to insure the support of Northern Negroes and liberal elements in the Democratic coalition. That coalition emerged strong from the 1964 election, easily able to overcome the loss of Southern states to Goldwater. At the same time, the enacted legislation, particularly the Voting Rights Act, laid the ground for a new Southern Democratic coalition of moderate whites and the hitherto untapped reservoir of Southern Negro voters.
The electoral context which made crisis effective in the South is also to be found in the big cities of the nation today. Deep tensions have developed among groups comprising the political coalitions of the large cities--the historic stronghold of the Democratic Party. As a consequence, urban politicians no longer turn in the vote to national Democratic candidates with unfailing regularity. The marked defections revealed in the elections of the 1950s and which continued until the Johnson landslide of 1964 are a matter of great concern to the national party. Precisely because of this concern, a strategy to exacerbate still further the strains in the urban coalition can be expected to evoke a response from national leaders.
The weakening of the urban coalition is a result of many basic changes in the relationship of local party leadership to its constituents. First, the political machine, the distinctive and traditional mechanism for forging alliances among competing groups in the city, is now virtually defunct in most cities Successive waves of municipal reform have deprived political leaders of control over the public resources--jobs, contracts, services and favors--which machine politicians formerly dispensed to voters in return for electoral support. Conflicts among elements in the urban Democratic coalition, once held together politically because each secured a share of these benefits, cannot now be so readily contained. And as the means of placating competing groups have diminished, tensions along ethnic and class lines have multiplied. These tensions are being intensified by the encroachments of an enlarging ghetto population on jobs, schools and residential areas Big-city mayors are thus caught between antagonistic working-class ethnic groups, the remaining middle class, and the rapidly enlarging minority poor.
Second, there are discontinuities in the relationship between the urban party apparatus and its ghetto constituents which have so far remained unexposed but which a welfare crisis would force into view. The ghetto vote has been growing rapidly and has so far returned overwhelming Democratic majorities. Nevertheless, this voting bloc is not fully integrated in the party apparatus, either through the representation of its leaders or the accommodation of its interests.
While the urban political apparatus includes members of new minority groups, these groups are by no means represented according to their increasing proportions in the population. More important, elected representation alone is not an adequate mechanism for the expression of group interests. Influence in urban politics is won not only at the polls but through the sustained activity of organized interests--such as labor unions, home-owner associations and business groups. These groups keep watch over the complex operations of municipal agencies, recognizing issues and regularly asserting their point of view through meetings with public officials, appearances at public hearings and the like, and by exploiting a whole array of channels of influence on government. Minority constituencies--at least the large proportion of them that are poor--are not regular participants in the various institutional spheres where organized interest groups typically develop. Thus the interests of the mass of minority poor are not protected by associations which make their own or other political leaders responsive by continuously calling them to account. Urban party organizations have become, in consequence, more an avenue for the personal advancement of minority political leaders than a channel for the expression of minority-group interests. And the big-city mayors, struggling to preserve an uneasy urban consensus, have thus been granted the slack to evade the conflict-generating interests of the ghetto. A crisis in public welfare would expose the tensions latent in this attenuated relationship between the ghetto vote and the urban party leadership, for it would thrust forward ghetto demands and back them with the threat of defections by voters who have so far remained both loyal and quiescent.
In the face of such a crisis, urban political leaders may well be paralyzed by a party apparatus which ties them to older constituent groups, even while the ranks of these groups are diminishing. The national Democratic leadership, however, is alert to the importance of the urban Negro vote, especially in national contests where the loyalty of other urban groups is weakening. Indeed, many of the legislative reforms of the Great Society can be understood as efforts, however feeble, to reinforce the allegiance of growing ghetto constituencies to the national Democratic Administration. In the thirties, Democrats began to put forward measures to circumvent the states in order to reach the big-city elements in the New Deal coalition; now it is becoming expedient to put forward measures to circumvent the weakened big-city mayors in order to reach the new minority poor.
Recent federal reforms have been impelled in part by widespread unrest in the ghetto, and instances of more aggressive Negro demands. But despite these signs that the ghetto vote may become less reliable in the future, there has been as yet no serious threat of massive defection. The national party has therefore not put much pressure on its urban branches to accommodate the minority poor. The resulting reforms have consequently been quite modest (e.g., the war against poverty, with its emphasis on the "involvement of the poor," is an effort to make the urban party apparatus somewhat more accommodating).
A welfare crisis would, of course, produce dramatic local political crisis, disrupting and exposing rifts among urban groups. Conservative Republicans are always ready to declaim the evils of public welfare, and they would probably be the first to raise a hue and cry. But deeper and politically more telling conflicts would take place within the Democratic coalition. Whites--both working-class ethnic groups and many in the middle class--would be aroused against the ghetto poor, while liberal groups, which until recently have been comforted by the notion that the poor are few and, in any event, receiving the beneficent assistance of public welfare, would probably support the movement. Group conflict, spelling political crisis for the local party apparatus, would thus become acute as welfare rolls mounted and the strains on local budgets became more severe. In New York City, where the Mayor is now facing desperate revenue shortages, welfare expenditures are already second only to those for public education.
It should also be noted that welfare costs are generally shared by local, state and federal governments, so that the crisis in the cities would intensify the struggle over revenues that is chronic in relations between cities and states. If the past is any predictor of the future, cities will fail to procure relief from this crisis by persuading states to increase their proportionate share of urban welfare costs, for state legislatures have been notoriously unsympathetic to the revenue needs of the city (especially where public welfare and minority groups are concerned).
If this strategy for crisis would intensify group cleavages, a federal income solution would not further exacerbate them. The demands put forward during recent civil rights drives in the Northern cities aroused the opposition of huge majorities. Indeed, such fierce resistance was evoked (e.g., school boycotts followed by counter-boycotts), that accessions by political leaders would have provoked greater political turmoil than the protests themselves, for profound class and ethnic interests are at stake in the employment, educational and residential institutions of our society. By contrast, legislative measures to provide direct income to the poor would permit national Democratic leaden to cultivate ghetto constituencies without unduly antagonizing other urban groups, as is the case when the battle lines are drawn over schools, housing or jobs. Furthermore, a federal income program would not only redeem local governments from the immediate crisis but would permanently relieve them of the financially and politically onerous burdens of public welfare--a function which generates support from none and hostility from many, not least of all welfare recipients. We suggest, in short, that if pervasive institutional reforms are not yet possible, requiring as they do expanded Negro political power and the development of new political alliances, crisis tactics can nevertheless be employed to secure particular reforms in the short run by exploiting weaknesses in current political alignments. Because the urban coalition stands weakened by group conflict today, disruption and threats of disaffection will count powerfully, provided that national leaders can respond with solutions which retain the support of ghetto constituencies while avoiding new group antagonisms and bolstering the urban party apparatus. These are the conditions, then, for an effective crisis strategy in the cities to secure an end to poverty.
No strategy, however confident its advocates may be, is foolproof. But if unforeseen contingencies thwart this plan to bring about new federal legislation in the field of poverty, it should also be noted that there would be gains even in defeat. For one thing, the plight of many poor people would be somewhat eased in the course of an assault upon public welfare. Existing recipients would come to know their rights and how to defend them, thus acquiring dignity where none now exists; and millions of dollars in withheld welfare benefits would become available to potential recipients now--not several generations from now. Such an attack should also be welcome to those currently concerned with programs designed to equip the young to rise out of poverty (e.g., Head Start), for surely children learn more readily when the oppressive burden of financial insecurity is lifted from the shoulders of their parents. And those seeking new ways to engage the Negro politically should remember that public resources have always been the fuel for low-income urban political organization. If organizers can deliver millions of dollars in cash benefits to the ghetto masses, it seems reasonable to expect that the masses will deliver their loyalties to their benefactors. At least, they have always done so in the past.
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http://www.glennbeck.com/content/articles/article/198/44024/
by Richard A. Cloward and Frances Fox Piven
How can the poor be organized to press for relief from poverty? How can a broad-based movement be developed and the current disarray of activist forces be halted? These questions confront, and confound, activists today. It is our purpose to advance a strategy which affords the basis for a convergence of civil rights organizations, militant anti-poverty groups and the poor. If this strategy were implemented, a political crisis would result that could lead to legislation for a guaranteed annual income and thus an end to poverty.
The strategy is based on the fact that a vast discrepancy exists between the benefits to which people are entitled under public welfare programs and the sums which they actually receive. This gulf is not recognized in a society that is wholly and self-righteously oriented toward getting people off the welfare rolls. It is widely known, for example, that nearly 8 million persons (half of them white) now subsist on welfare, but it is not generally known that for every person on the rolls at least one more probably meets existing criteria of eligibility but is not obtaining assistance.
The discrepancy is not an accident stemming from bureaucratic inefficiency; rather, it is an integral feature of the welfare system which, if challenged, would precipitate a profound financial and political crisis. The force for that challenge, and the strategy we propose, is a massive drive to recruit the poor onto the welfare rolls.
The distribution of public assistance has been a local and state responsibility, and that accounts in large part for the abysmal character of welfare practices. Despite the growing involvement of federal agencies in supervisory and reimbursement arrangements, state and local community forces are still decisive. The poor are most visible and proximate in the local community; antagonism toward them (and toward the agencies which are implicated with them) has always, therefore, been more intense locally than at the federal level. In recent years, local communities have increasingly felt class and ethnic friction generated by competition for neighborhoods, schools, jobs and political power. Public welfare systems are under the constant stress of conflict and opposition, made only sharper by the rising costs to localities of public aid. And, to accommodate this pressure, welfare practice everywhere has become more restrictive than welfare statute; much of the time it verges on lawlessness. Thus, public welfare systems try to keep their budgets down and their rolls low by failing to inform people of the rights available to them; by intimidating and shaming them to the degree that they are reluctant either to apply or to press claims, and by arbitrarily denying benefits to those who are eligible.
A series of welfare drives in large cities would, we believe, impel action on a new federal program to distribute income, eliminating the present public welfare system and alleviating the abject poverty which it perpetrates. Widespread campaigns to register the eligible poor for welfare aid, and to help existing recipients obtain their full benefits, would produce bureaucratic disruption in welfare agencies and fiscal disruption in local and state governments. These disruptions would generate severe political strains, and deepen existing divisions among elements in the big-city Democratic coalition: the remaining white middle class, the white working-class ethnic groups and the growing minority poor. To avoid a further weakening of that historic coalition, a national Democratic administration would be con-strained to advance a federal solution to poverty that would override local welfare failures, local class and racial conflicts and local revenue dilemmas. By the internal disruption of local bureaucratic practices, by the furor over public welfare poverty, and by the collapse of current financing arrangements, powerful forces can be generated for major economic reforms at the national level.
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. Instead, programs are demanded to enable people to become economically competitive. But such programs are of no use to millions of today's poor. For example, one-third of the 35 million poor Americans are in families headed by females; these heads of family cannot be aided appreciably by job retraining, higher minimum wages, accelerated rates of economic growth, or employment in public works projects. Nor can the 5 million aged who are poor, nor those whose poverty results from the ill health of the wage earner. Programs to enhance individual mobility will chiefly benefit the very young, if not the as yet unborn. Individual mobility is no answer to the question of how to abolish the massive problem of poverty now.
It has never been the full answer. If many people in the past have found their way up from poverty by the path of individual mobility, many others have taken a different route. Organized labor stands out as a major example. Although many American workers never yielded their dreams of individual achievement, they accepted and practiced the principle that each can benefit only as the status of workers as a whole is elevated. They bargained for collective mobility, not for individual mobility; to promote their fortunes in the aggregate, not to promote the prospects of one worker over another. And if each finally found himself in the same relative economic relationship to his fellows as when he began, it was nevertheless clear that all were infinitely better off. That fact has sustained the labor movement in the face of a counter pull from the ideal of individual achievement.
But many of the contemporary poor will not rise from poverty by organizing to bargain collectively. They either are not in the labor force or are In such marginal and dispersed occupations (e.g., domestic servants) that it is extremely difficult to organize them. Compared with other groups, then, many of today's poor cannot secure a redistribution of income by organizing within the institution of private enterprise. A federal program of income redistribution has become necessary to elevate the poor en masse from poverty.
Several ways have been proposed for redistributing income through the federal government. It is not our purpose here to assess the relative merits of these plans, which are still undergoing debate and clarification. Whatever mechanism is eventually adopted, however, it must include certain features if it is not merely to perpetuate in a new guise the present evils of the public welfare system.
First, adequate levels of income must be assured. (Public welfare levels are astonishingly low; indeed, states typically define a "minimum" standard of living and then grant only a percentage of it, so that families are held well below what the government itself officially defines as the poverty level.) Furthermore, income should be distributed without requiring that recipients first divest themselves of their assets, as public welfare now does, thereby pauperizing families as a condition of sustenance.
Second, the right to income must be guaranteed, or the oppression of the welfare poor will not be eliminated. Because benefits are conditional under the present public welfare system, submission to arbitrary governmental power is regularly made the price of sustenance. People have been coerced into attending literacy classes or participating in medical or vocational rehabilitation regimes, on pain of having their benefits terminated. Men are forced into labor on virtually any terms lest they forfeit their welfare aid. One can prize literacy, health and work, while still vigorously opposing the right of government to compel compliance with these values.
Conditional benefits thus result in violations of civil liberties throughout the nation, and in a pervasive oppression of the poor. And these violations are not less real because the impulse leading to them is altruistic and the agency is professional. If new systems of income distribution continue to permit the professional bureaucracies to choose when to give and when to withhold financial relief, the poor will once again be surrendered to an arrangement in which their rights are diminished in the name of overcoming their vices. Those who lead an attack on the welfare system must therefore be alert to the pitfalls of inadequate but placating reforms which give the appearance of victory to what is in truth defeat.
How much economic force can be mobilized by this strategy? This question is not easy to answer because few studies have been conducted of people who are not receiving public assistance even though they may be eligible. For the purposes of this presentation, a few facts about New York City may be suggestive. Since practices elsewhere are generally acknowledged to be even more restrictive, the estimates of unused benefits which follow probably yield a conservative estimate of the potential force of the strategy set forth in this article.
Basic assistance for food and rent: The most striking characteristic of public welfare practice is that a great many people who appear to be eligible for assistance are not on the welfare rolls. The average monthly total of New York City residents receiving assistance in 1959 was 325,771, but according to the 1960 census. 716,000 persons (unrelated or in families) appeared to be subsisting on incomes at or below the prevailing welfare eligibility levels (e.g $2,070 for a family of four). In that same year, 539,000 people subsisted on incomes less than 80 per cent of the welfare minimums, and 200,000 lived alone or in families on incomes reported to be less than half of eligibility levels. Thus it appears that for every person on welfare in 1959, at least one more was eligible.
The results of two surveys of selected areas in Manhattan support the contention that many people subsist on incomes below welfare eligibility levels. One of these, conducted by Greenleigh Associates in 1964 in an urban-renewal area on New York's upper West Side, found 9 per cent of those not on the rolls were in such acute need that they appeared to qualify for emergency assistance. The study showed, further, that a substantial number of families that were not in a "critical" condition would probably have qualified for supplemental assistance.
The other survey, conducted in 1961 by Mobilization for Youth, had similar findings. The area from which its sample was drawn, 67 square blocks on the lower East Side, is a poor one, but by no means the poorest in New York City. Yet 13 per cent of the total sample who were not on the welfare rolls reported incomes falling below the prevailing welfare schedules for food and rent.
There is no reason to suppose that the discrepancy between those eligible for and those receiving assistance has narrowed much in the past few years. The welfare rolls have gone up, to be sure, but so have eligibility levels. Since the economic circumstances of impoverished groups in New York have not improved appreciably in the past few years, each such rise increases the number of people who are potentially eligible for some degree of assistance.
Even if one allows for the possibility that family-income figures are grossly underestimated by the census, the financial implications of the proposed strategy are still very great. In 1965, the monthly average of persons receiving cash assistance in New York was 490,000, at a total cost of $440 million; the rolls have now risen above 500,000, so that costs will exceed $500 million in 1966. An increase in the rolls of a mere 20 per cent would cost an already overburdened municipality some $100 million.
Special grants: Public assistance recipients in New York are also entitled to receive "nonrecurring" grants for clothing, household equipment and furniture-including washing machines, refrigerators, beds and bedding, tables and chairs. It hardly needs to be noted that most impoverished families have grossly inadequate clothing and household furnishings. The Greenleigh study, for example, found that 52 per cent of the families on public assistance lacked anything approaching adequate furniture. This condition results because almost nothing is spent on special grants in New York. In October, 1965, a typical month, the Department of Welfare spent only $2.50 per recipient for heavy clothing and $1.30 for household furnishings. Taken together, grants of this kind amounted in 1965 to a mere $40 per person, or a total of $20 million for the entire year. Considering the real needs of families, the successful demand for full entitlements could multiply these expenditures tenfold or more and that would involve the disbursement of many millions of dollars indeed.
One must be cautious in making generalizations about the prospects for this strategy in any jurisdiction unless the structure of welfare practices has been examined in some detail. We can, however, cite other studies conducted in other places to show that New York practices are not atypical. In Detroit, for example, Greenleigh Associates studied a large sample of households in a low-income district in 1965. Twenty per cent were already receiving assistance, but 35 per cent more were judged to need it. Although the authors made no strict determination of the eligibility of these families under the laws of Michigan, they believed that "larger numbers of persons were eligible than receiving." A good many of these families did not know that public assistance was available; others thought they would be deemed ineligible; not a few were ashamed or afraid to ask.
Similar deprivations have been shown in nation-wide studies. In 1963, the federal government carried out a survey based on a national sample of 5,500 families whose benefits under Aid to Dependent Children had been terminated. Thirty-four per cent of these cases were officially in need of income at the point of closing: this was true of 30 per cent of the white and 44 per cent of the Negro cases. The chief basis for termination given in local department records was "other reasons" (i.e., other than improvement in financial condition, which would make dependence on welfare unnecessary). Upon closer examination, these "other reasons" turned out to be "unsuitable home" (i.e., the presence of illegitimate children), "failure to comply with departmental regulations'' or "refusal to take legal action against a putative father." (Negroes were especially singled out for punitive action on the ground that children were not being maintained in "suitable homes.") The amounts of money that people are deprived of by these injustices are very great.
In order to generate a crisis, the poor must obtain benefits which they have forfeited. Until now, they have been inhibited from asserting claims by self-protective devices within the welfare system: its capacity to limit information, to intimidate applicants, to demoralize recipients, and arbitrarily to deny lawful claims.
Ignorance of welfare rights can be attacked through a massive educational campaign Brochures describing benefits in simple, clear language, and urging people to seek their full entitlements, should be distributed door to door in tenements and public housing projects, and deposited in stores, schools, churches and civic centers. Advertisements should be placed in newspapers; spot announcements should be made on radio. Leaders of social, religious, fraternal and political groups in the slums should also be enlisted to recruit the eligible to the rolls. The fact that the campaign is intended to inform people of their legal rights under a government program, that it is a civic education drive, will lend it legitimacy.
But information alone will not suffice. Organizers will have to become advocates in order to deal effectively with improper rejections and terminations. The advocate's task is to appraise the circumstances of each case, to argue its merits before welfare, to threaten legal action if satisfaction is not given. In some cases, it will be necessary to contest decisions by requesting a "fair hearing" before the appropriate state supervisory agency; it may occasionally be necessary to sue for redress in the courts. Hearings and court actions will require lawyers, many of whom, in cities like New York, can be recruited on a voluntary basis, especially under the banner of a movement to end poverty by a strategy of asserting legal rights. However, most cases will not require an expert knowledge of law, but only of welfare regulations; the rules can be learned by laymen, including welfare recipients themselves (who can help to man "information and advocacy" centers). To aid workers in these centers, handbooks should be prepared describing welfare rights and the tactics to employ in claiming them.
Advocacy must be supplemented by organized demonstrations to create a climate of militancy that will overcome the invidious and immobilizing attitudes which many potential recipients hold toward being "on welfare." In such a climate, many more poor people are likely to become their own advocates and will not need to rely on aid from organizers.
As the crisis develops, it will be important to use the mass media to inform the broader liberal community about the inefficiencies and injustices of welfare. For example, the system will not be able to process many new applicants because of cumbersome and often unconstitutional investigatory procedures (which cost 20c for every dollar disbursed). As delays mount, so should the public demand that a simplified affidavit supplant these procedures, so that the poor may certify to their condition. If the system reacts by making the proof of eligibility more difficult, the demand should be made that the Department of Health, Education and Welfare dispatch "eligibility registrars" to enforce federal statutes governing local programs. And throughout the crisis, the mass media should be used to advance arguments for a new federal income distribution program.
Although new resources in organizers and funds would have to be developed to mount this campaign, a variety of conventional agencies in the large cities could also be drawn upon for help. The idea of "welfare rights" has begun to attract attention in many liberal circles. A number of organizations, partly under the aegis of the "war against poverty," are developing information and advocacy services for low-income people [see "Poverty, Injustice and the Welfare State" by Richard A. Cloward and Richard M. Elman, The Nation, issues of February 28, 1966 and March 7, 1966]. It is not likely that these organizations will directly participate in the present strategy, for obvious political reasons. But whether they participate or not, they constitute a growing network of resources to which people can be referred for help in establishing and maintaining entitlements. In the final analysis, it does not matter who helps people to get on the rolls or to get additional entitlements, so long as the job is done.
Since this plan deals with problems of great immediacy In the lives of the poor, it should motivate some of them to involve themselves in regular organizational activities. Welfare recipients, chiefly ADC mothers, are already forming federations, committees and councils in cities across the nation; in Boston, New York, Newark, Cleveland, Chicago, Detroit and Los Angeles, to mention a few. Such groups typically focus on obtaining full entitlements for existing recipients rather than on recruiting new recipients, and they do not yet comprise a national movement. But their very existence attests to a growing readiness among ghetto residents to act against public welfare.
To generate an expressly political movement, cadres of aggressive organizers would have to come from the civil rights movement and the churches, from militant low-income organizations like those formed by the Industrial Areas Foundation (that is, by Saul Alinsky), and from other groups on the Left. These activists should be quick to see the difference between programs to redress individual grievances and a large-scale social-action campaign for national policy reform.
Movements that depend on involving masses of poor people have generally failed in America. Why would the proposed strategy to engage the poor succeed?
First, this plan promises immediate economic benefits. This is a point of some importance because, whereas America's poor have not been moved in any number by radical political ideologies, they have sometimes been moved by their economic interests. Since radical movements in America have rarely been able to provide visible economic incentives, they have usually failed to secure mass participation of any kind. The conservative "business unionism" of organized labor is explained by this fact, for membership enlarged only as unionism paid off in material benefits. Union leaders have understood that their strength derives almost entirely from their capacity to provide economic rewards to members. Although leaders have increasingly acted in political spheres, their influence has been directed chiefly to matters of governmental policy affecting the well-being of organized workers. The same point is made by the experience of rent strikes in Northern cities. Their organizers were often motivated by radical ideologies, but tenants have been attracted by the promise that housing improvements would quickly be made if they withheld their rent.
Second, for this strategy to succeed, one need not ask more of most of the poor than that they claim lawful benefits. Thus the plan has the extraordinary capability of yielding mass influence without mass participation, at least as the term "participation" is ordinarily understood. Mass influence in this case stems from the consumption of benefits and does not require that large groups of people be involved in regular organizational roles.
Moreover, this kind of mass influence is cumulative because benefits are continuous. Once eligibility for basic food and rent grants is established, the dram on local resources persists indefinitely. Other movements have failed precisely because they could not produce continuous and cumulative influence. In the Northern rent strikes, for example, tenant participation depended largely on immediate grievances; as soon as landlords made the most minimal repairs, participation fell away and with it the impact of the movement. Efforts to revive tenant participation by organizing demonstrations around broader housing issues (e.g., the expansion of public housing) did not succeed because the incentives were not immediate.
Third, the prospects for mass influence are enhanced because this plan provides a practical basis for coalition between poor whites and poor Negroes. Advocates of low-income movements have not been able to suggest how poor whites and poor Negroes can be united in an expressly lower-class movement. Despite pleas of some Negro leaders for joint action on programs requiring integration, poor whites have steadfastly resisted making common cause with poor Negroes. By contrast, the benefits of the present plan are as great for whites as for Negroes. In the big cities, at least, it does not seem likely that poor whites, whatever their prejudices against either Negroes or public welfare, will refuse to participate when Negroes aggressively claim benefits that are unlawfully denied to them as well. One salutary consequence of public information campaigns to acquaint Negroes with their rights is that many whites will be made aware of theirs. Even if whites prefer to work through their own organizations and leaders, the consequences will be equivalent to joining with Negroes. For if the object is to focus attention on the need for new economic measures by producing a crisis over the dole, anyone who insists upon extracting maximum benefits from public welfare is in effect part of a coalition and is contributing to the cause.
The ultimate aim of this strategy is a new program for direct income distribution. What reason is there to expect that the federal government will enact such legislation in response to a crisis in the welfare system?
We ordinarily think of major legislation as taking form only through established electoral processes. We tend to overlook the force of crisis in precipitating legislative reform, partly because we lack a theoretical framework by which to understand the impact of major disruptions.
By crisis, we mean a publicly visible disruption in some institutional sphere. Crisis 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. Public trouble is a political liability, it calls for action by political leaders to stabilize the situation. Because crisis usually creates or exposes conflict, it threatens to produce cleavages in a political consensus which politicians will ordinarily act to avert.
Although crisis impels political action, it does not itself determine the selection of specific solutions. Political leaders will try to respond with proposals which work to their advantage in the electoral process. Unless group cleavages form around issues and demands, the politician has great latitude and tends to proffer only the minimum action required to quell disturbances without risking existing electoral support. Spontaneous disruptions, such as riots, rarely produce leaders who articulate demands; thus no terms are imposed, and political leaders are permitted to respond in ways that merely restore a semblance of stability without offending other groups in a coalition.
When, however, a crisis is defined by its participants--or by other activated groups--as a matter of clear issues and preferred solutions, terms are imposed on the politicians' bid for their support. Whether political leaders then design solutions to reflect these terms depends on a twofold calculation: first, the impact of the crisis and the issues it raises on existing alignments and, second, the gains or losses in support to be expected as a result of a proposed resolution.
As to the impact on existing alignments, issues exposed by a crisis may activate new groups, thus altering the balance of support and opposition on the issues; or it may polarize group sentiments, altering the terms which must be offered to insure the support of given constituent groups. In framing resolutions, politicians are more responsive to group shifts and are more likely to accommodate to the terms imposed when electoral coalitions threatened by crisis are already uncertain or weakening. In other words, the politician responds to group demands, not only by calculating the magnitude of electoral gains and losses, but by assessing the impact of the resolution on the stability of existing or potential coalitions. Political leaders are especially responsive to group shifts when the terms of settlement can be framed so as to shore up an existing coalition, or as a basis for the development of new and more stable alignments, without jeopardizing existing support. Then, indeed, the calculation of net gain is most secure.
The legislative reforms of the depression years, for example, were impelled not so much by organized interests exercised through regular electoral processes as by widespread economic crisis. That crisis precipitated the disruption of the regionally based coalitions underlying the old national parties. During the realignments of 1932, a new Democratic coalition was formed, based heavily on urban working-class groups. Once in power, the national Democratic leadership proposed and implemented the economic reforms of the New Deal. Although these measures were a response to the imperative of economic crisis, the types of measures enacted were designed to secure and stabilize the new Democratic coalition.
The civil rights movement, to take a recent case, also reveals the relationship of crisis and electoral conditions in producing legislative reform. The crisis in the South took place in the context of a weakening North-South Democratic coalition. The strains in that coalition were first evident in the Dixiecrat desertion of 1948, and continued through the Eisenhower years as the Republicans gained ground in the Southern states. Democratic party leaders at first tried to hold the dissident South by warding off the demands of enlarging Negro constituencies in Northern cities. Thus for two decades the national Democratic Party campaigned on strongly worded civil rights planks but enacted only token measures. The civil rights movement forced the Democrats' hand: a crumbling Southern partnership was forfeited, and major civil rights legislation was put forward, designed to insure the support of Northern Negroes and liberal elements in the Democratic coalition. That coalition emerged strong from the 1964 election, easily able to overcome the loss of Southern states to Goldwater. At the same time, the enacted legislation, particularly the Voting Rights Act, laid the ground for a new Southern Democratic coalition of moderate whites and the hitherto untapped reservoir of Southern Negro voters.
The electoral context which made crisis effective in the South is also to be found in the big cities of the nation today. Deep tensions have developed among groups comprising the political coalitions of the large cities--the historic stronghold of the Democratic Party. As a consequence, urban politicians no longer turn in the vote to national Democratic candidates with unfailing regularity. The marked defections revealed in the elections of the 1950s and which continued until the Johnson landslide of 1964 are a matter of great concern to the national party. Precisely because of this concern, a strategy to exacerbate still further the strains in the urban coalition can be expected to evoke a response from national leaders.
The weakening of the urban coalition is a result of many basic changes in the relationship of local party leadership to its constituents. First, the political machine, the distinctive and traditional mechanism for forging alliances among competing groups in the city, is now virtually defunct in most cities Successive waves of municipal reform have deprived political leaders of control over the public resources--jobs, contracts, services and favors--which machine politicians formerly dispensed to voters in return for electoral support. Conflicts among elements in the urban Democratic coalition, once held together politically because each secured a share of these benefits, cannot now be so readily contained. And as the means of placating competing groups have diminished, tensions along ethnic and class lines have multiplied. These tensions are being intensified by the encroachments of an enlarging ghetto population on jobs, schools and residential areas Big-city mayors are thus caught between antagonistic working-class ethnic groups, the remaining middle class, and the rapidly enlarging minority poor.
Second, there are discontinuities in the relationship between the urban party apparatus and its ghetto constituents which have so far remained unexposed but which a welfare crisis would force into view. The ghetto vote has been growing rapidly and has so far returned overwhelming Democratic majorities. Nevertheless, this voting bloc is not fully integrated in the party apparatus, either through the representation of its leaders or the accommodation of its interests.
While the urban political apparatus includes members of new minority groups, these groups are by no means represented according to their increasing proportions in the population. More important, elected representation alone is not an adequate mechanism for the expression of group interests. Influence in urban politics is won not only at the polls but through the sustained activity of organized interests--such as labor unions, home-owner associations and business groups. These groups keep watch over the complex operations of municipal agencies, recognizing issues and regularly asserting their point of view through meetings with public officials, appearances at public hearings and the like, and by exploiting a whole array of channels of influence on government. Minority constituencies--at least the large proportion of them that are poor--are not regular participants in the various institutional spheres where organized interest groups typically develop. Thus the interests of the mass of minority poor are not protected by associations which make their own or other political leaders responsive by continuously calling them to account. Urban party organizations have become, in consequence, more an avenue for the personal advancement of minority political leaders than a channel for the expression of minority-group interests. And the big-city mayors, struggling to preserve an uneasy urban consensus, have thus been granted the slack to evade the conflict-generating interests of the ghetto. A crisis in public welfare would expose the tensions latent in this attenuated relationship between the ghetto vote and the urban party leadership, for it would thrust forward ghetto demands and back them with the threat of defections by voters who have so far remained both loyal and quiescent.
In the face of such a crisis, urban political leaders may well be paralyzed by a party apparatus which ties them to older constituent groups, even while the ranks of these groups are diminishing. The national Democratic leadership, however, is alert to the importance of the urban Negro vote, especially in national contests where the loyalty of other urban groups is weakening. Indeed, many of the legislative reforms of the Great Society can be understood as efforts, however feeble, to reinforce the allegiance of growing ghetto constituencies to the national Democratic Administration. In the thirties, Democrats began to put forward measures to circumvent the states in order to reach the big-city elements in the New Deal coalition; now it is becoming expedient to put forward measures to circumvent the weakened big-city mayors in order to reach the new minority poor.
Recent federal reforms have been impelled in part by widespread unrest in the ghetto, and instances of more aggressive Negro demands. But despite these signs that the ghetto vote may become less reliable in the future, there has been as yet no serious threat of massive defection. The national party has therefore not put much pressure on its urban branches to accommodate the minority poor. The resulting reforms have consequently been quite modest (e.g., the war against poverty, with its emphasis on the "involvement of the poor," is an effort to make the urban party apparatus somewhat more accommodating).
A welfare crisis would, of course, produce dramatic local political crisis, disrupting and exposing rifts among urban groups. Conservative Republicans are always ready to declaim the evils of public welfare, and they would probably be the first to raise a hue and cry. But deeper and politically more telling conflicts would take place within the Democratic coalition. Whites--both working-class ethnic groups and many in the middle class--would be aroused against the ghetto poor, while liberal groups, which until recently have been comforted by the notion that the poor are few and, in any event, receiving the beneficent assistance of public welfare, would probably support the movement. Group conflict, spelling political crisis for the local party apparatus, would thus become acute as welfare rolls mounted and the strains on local budgets became more severe. In New York City, where the Mayor is now facing desperate revenue shortages, welfare expenditures are already second only to those for public education.
It should also be noted that welfare costs are generally shared by local, state and federal governments, so that the crisis in the cities would intensify the struggle over revenues that is chronic in relations between cities and states. If the past is any predictor of the future, cities will fail to procure relief from this crisis by persuading states to increase their proportionate share of urban welfare costs, for state legislatures have been notoriously unsympathetic to the revenue needs of the city (especially where public welfare and minority groups are concerned).
If this strategy for crisis would intensify group cleavages, a federal income solution would not further exacerbate them. The demands put forward during recent civil rights drives in the Northern cities aroused the opposition of huge majorities. Indeed, such fierce resistance was evoked (e.g., school boycotts followed by counter-boycotts), that accessions by political leaders would have provoked greater political turmoil than the protests themselves, for profound class and ethnic interests are at stake in the employment, educational and residential institutions of our society. By contrast, legislative measures to provide direct income to the poor would permit national Democratic leaden to cultivate ghetto constituencies without unduly antagonizing other urban groups, as is the case when the battle lines are drawn over schools, housing or jobs. Furthermore, a federal income program would not only redeem local governments from the immediate crisis but would permanently relieve them of the financially and politically onerous burdens of public welfare--a function which generates support from none and hostility from many, not least of all welfare recipients. We suggest, in short, that if pervasive institutional reforms are not yet possible, requiring as they do expanded Negro political power and the development of new political alliances, crisis tactics can nevertheless be employed to secure particular reforms in the short run by exploiting weaknesses in current political alignments. Because the urban coalition stands weakened by group conflict today, disruption and threats of disaffection will count powerfully, provided that national leaders can respond with solutions which retain the support of ghetto constituencies while avoiding new group antagonisms and bolstering the urban party apparatus. These are the conditions, then, for an effective crisis strategy in the cities to secure an end to poverty.
No strategy, however confident its advocates may be, is foolproof. But if unforeseen contingencies thwart this plan to bring about new federal legislation in the field of poverty, it should also be noted that there would be gains even in defeat. For one thing, the plight of many poor people would be somewhat eased in the course of an assault upon public welfare. Existing recipients would come to know their rights and how to defend them, thus acquiring dignity where none now exists; and millions of dollars in withheld welfare benefits would become available to potential recipients now--not several generations from now. Such an attack should also be welcome to those currently concerned with programs designed to equip the young to rise out of poverty (e.g., Head Start), for surely children learn more readily when the oppressive burden of financial insecurity is lifted from the shoulders of their parents. And those seeking new ways to engage the Negro politically should remember that public resources have always been the fuel for low-income urban political organization. If organizers can deliver millions of dollars in cash benefits to the ghetto masses, it seems reasonable to expect that the masses will deliver their loyalties to their benefactors. At least, they have always done so in the past.
see more at glenn beck
http://www.glennbeck.com/content/articles/article/198/44024/
WHY WE NEED TO LET STATES GO BROKE
WHY WE NEED TO LET STATES GO BROKE
Federal Band-Aids won't cover the fiscal problems of such states as New York, California, Michigan and Connecticut forever. State bankruptcy and fundamental restructuring of state and local finance -- and labor relations -- is at hand.
Take Connecticut. In the current fiscal year, $2 billion in federal subsidies have helped tide it over the recession -- a hefty share of its $15 billion budget. But these infusions are one-shot grants, renewed only if Congress acts affirmatively to do so. Other states depend on similar manifestations of federal largess.
In Washington, the House is set to pass a $26 billion aid package this week -- fresh federal aid amounting to about 2 percent of state and local spending. But if the Republicans win control of Congress this fall, it is hard to see any legislative willingness to renew these subsidies.
Instead, GOP lawmakers will point to the examples of New Jersey, Virginia and Indiana -- where conservative governors have slashed spending to avoid tax hikes. In Virginia, Gov. Bob McDonnell has reduced spending to pre-2006 levels.
If Congress fails to renew its subsidies, the more profligate states will face cash shortfalls in the current fiscal year. They'll threaten school closures, prison releases and all manner of mayhem if their subsidies aren't renewed. But the Republicans in Washington are likely to refuse -- asking why the responsible states should bail out the spendthrifts in Albany, Sacramento, Lansing and Hartford.
At that point, the bond markets will start eyeing state (and local) balance sheets more critically -- demanding higher rates or even refusing to lend. California won't be the only one trying to get by on IOUs.
But beyond this tale of woe lies a golden opportunity to reform state governments and redress the imbalance of power between elected officials and public-employee unions.
Absent endless federal subsidies, states will simply no longer be able to afford to give the unions everything that they want. And governors -- many of them newly elected Republicans -- will realize that they can't even afford to honor agreements their big-spending predecessors OK'd.
The GOP Congress should then amend the federal bankruptcy law to provide for a way -- now absent -- for states to declare bankruptcy. (Municipalities can do so under current law, but states have no such relief.)
Here's the key: The reforms must require that states abrogate their public-employee union agreements in the bankruptcy process, just as private corporations like Delta and Chrysler have done. The wage hikes, the work rules, the pension plans all go out the window.
Few states will have the starch to cut benefits for those now receiving them. But most will cut pensions for current workers and all will slice them for future employees. Even the threat will be a powerful bargaining tool.
And beyond the fiscal adjustments, the power of the municipal- and public-employee unions will be broken.
Voters throughout America will loudly applaud if Congress tells the profligate states, "Work it out on your own. Don't look to us for a bailout."
President Obama could veto the bankruptcy reforms -- but a Republican Congress need do nothing to assist states in their plight until he relents. All of the political and financial leverage will be on Congress' side.
The result could be the greatest revolution in state and local governance since public-employee unions came on the scene. The public and the voters would get their local governments back, and the grip of public unions will be weakened. It would be the state and local equivalent of President Ronald Reagan's tough stand against the air-traffic controllers' strike.
Politically, the unions that fund and fuel the Democratic Party would be emasculated, dramatically shifting the national balance of power.
Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's prediction about socialism will have come true for America's states: "Sooner or later, they run out of other peoples' money."
by DICK MORRIS & EILEEN MCGANN
Published in the New York Post on August 10, 2010
Go to DickMorris.com to read all of Dick's columns!
Federal Band-Aids won't cover the fiscal problems of such states as New York, California, Michigan and Connecticut forever. State bankruptcy and fundamental restructuring of state and local finance -- and labor relations -- is at hand.
Take Connecticut. In the current fiscal year, $2 billion in federal subsidies have helped tide it over the recession -- a hefty share of its $15 billion budget. But these infusions are one-shot grants, renewed only if Congress acts affirmatively to do so. Other states depend on similar manifestations of federal largess.
In Washington, the House is set to pass a $26 billion aid package this week -- fresh federal aid amounting to about 2 percent of state and local spending. But if the Republicans win control of Congress this fall, it is hard to see any legislative willingness to renew these subsidies.
Instead, GOP lawmakers will point to the examples of New Jersey, Virginia and Indiana -- where conservative governors have slashed spending to avoid tax hikes. In Virginia, Gov. Bob McDonnell has reduced spending to pre-2006 levels.
If Congress fails to renew its subsidies, the more profligate states will face cash shortfalls in the current fiscal year. They'll threaten school closures, prison releases and all manner of mayhem if their subsidies aren't renewed. But the Republicans in Washington are likely to refuse -- asking why the responsible states should bail out the spendthrifts in Albany, Sacramento, Lansing and Hartford.
At that point, the bond markets will start eyeing state (and local) balance sheets more critically -- demanding higher rates or even refusing to lend. California won't be the only one trying to get by on IOUs.
But beyond this tale of woe lies a golden opportunity to reform state governments and redress the imbalance of power between elected officials and public-employee unions.
Absent endless federal subsidies, states will simply no longer be able to afford to give the unions everything that they want. And governors -- many of them newly elected Republicans -- will realize that they can't even afford to honor agreements their big-spending predecessors OK'd.
The GOP Congress should then amend the federal bankruptcy law to provide for a way -- now absent -- for states to declare bankruptcy. (Municipalities can do so under current law, but states have no such relief.)
Here's the key: The reforms must require that states abrogate their public-employee union agreements in the bankruptcy process, just as private corporations like Delta and Chrysler have done. The wage hikes, the work rules, the pension plans all go out the window.
Few states will have the starch to cut benefits for those now receiving them. But most will cut pensions for current workers and all will slice them for future employees. Even the threat will be a powerful bargaining tool.
And beyond the fiscal adjustments, the power of the municipal- and public-employee unions will be broken.
Voters throughout America will loudly applaud if Congress tells the profligate states, "Work it out on your own. Don't look to us for a bailout."
President Obama could veto the bankruptcy reforms -- but a Republican Congress need do nothing to assist states in their plight until he relents. All of the political and financial leverage will be on Congress' side.
The result could be the greatest revolution in state and local governance since public-employee unions came on the scene. The public and the voters would get their local governments back, and the grip of public unions will be weakened. It would be the state and local equivalent of President Ronald Reagan's tough stand against the air-traffic controllers' strike.
Politically, the unions that fund and fuel the Democratic Party would be emasculated, dramatically shifting the national balance of power.
Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's prediction about socialism will have come true for America's states: "Sooner or later, they run out of other peoples' money."
by DICK MORRIS & EILEEN MCGANN
Published in the New York Post on August 10, 2010
Go to DickMorris.com to read all of Dick's columns!
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Federal workers beat private sectot jobs
Federal workers earning double their private counterparts PAY RATES
By Dennis Cauchon
At a time when workers' pay and benefits have stagnated, federal employees' average compensation has grown to more than double what private sector workers earn, a USA TODAY analysis finds.
Federal workers have been awarded bigger average pay and benefit increases than private employees for nine years in a row. The compensation gap between federal and private workers has doubled in the past decade.
Federal civil servants earned average pay and benefits of $123,049 in 2009 while private workers made $61,051 in total compensation, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The data are the latest available.
The federal compensation advantage has grown from $30,415 in 2000 to $61,998 last year.
Public employee unions say the compensation gap reflects the increasingly high level of skill and education required for most federal jobs and the government contracting out lower-paid jobs to the private sector in recent years.
"The data are not useful for a direct public-private pay comparison," says Colleen Kelley, president of the National Treasury Employees Union.
Chris Edwards, a budget analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute, thinks otherwise. "Can't we now all agree that federal workers are overpaid and do something about it?" he asks.
Last week, President Obama ordered a freeze on bonuses for 2,900 political appointees. For the rest of the 2-million-person federal workforce, Obama asked for a 1.4% across-the-board pay hike in 2011, the smallest in more than a decade. Federal workers also would qualify for seniority pay hikes.
Congressional Republicans want to cancel the across-the-board increase in 2011, which would save $2.2 billion.
"Americans are fed up with public employee pay scales far exceeding that in the private sector," says Rep. Eric Cantor, R-Va., the second-ranking Republican in the House.
Sen. Ted Kaufman, D-Del., says a pay freeze would unfairly scapegoat federal workers without addressing real budget problems.
What the data show:
•Benefits. Federal workers received average benefits worth $41,791 in 2009. Most of this was the government's contribution to pensions. Employees contributed an additional $10,569.
•Pay. The average federal salary has grown 33% faster than inflation since 2000. USA TODAY reported in March that the federal government pays an average of 20% more than private firms for comparable occupations. The analysis did not consider differences in experience and education.
•Total compensation. Federal compensation has grown 36.9% since 2000 after adjusting for inflation, compared with 8.8% for private workers.
see the complete article at USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/income/2010-08-10-1Afedpay10_ST_N.htm
see the complete article here
By Dennis Cauchon
At a time when workers' pay and benefits have stagnated, federal employees' average compensation has grown to more than double what private sector workers earn, a USA TODAY analysis finds.
Federal workers have been awarded bigger average pay and benefit increases than private employees for nine years in a row. The compensation gap between federal and private workers has doubled in the past decade.
Federal civil servants earned average pay and benefits of $123,049 in 2009 while private workers made $61,051 in total compensation, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The data are the latest available.
The federal compensation advantage has grown from $30,415 in 2000 to $61,998 last year.
Public employee unions say the compensation gap reflects the increasingly high level of skill and education required for most federal jobs and the government contracting out lower-paid jobs to the private sector in recent years.
"The data are not useful for a direct public-private pay comparison," says Colleen Kelley, president of the National Treasury Employees Union.
Chris Edwards, a budget analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute, thinks otherwise. "Can't we now all agree that federal workers are overpaid and do something about it?" he asks.
Last week, President Obama ordered a freeze on bonuses for 2,900 political appointees. For the rest of the 2-million-person federal workforce, Obama asked for a 1.4% across-the-board pay hike in 2011, the smallest in more than a decade. Federal workers also would qualify for seniority pay hikes.
Congressional Republicans want to cancel the across-the-board increase in 2011, which would save $2.2 billion.
"Americans are fed up with public employee pay scales far exceeding that in the private sector," says Rep. Eric Cantor, R-Va., the second-ranking Republican in the House.
Sen. Ted Kaufman, D-Del., says a pay freeze would unfairly scapegoat federal workers without addressing real budget problems.
What the data show:
•Benefits. Federal workers received average benefits worth $41,791 in 2009. Most of this was the government's contribution to pensions. Employees contributed an additional $10,569.
•Pay. The average federal salary has grown 33% faster than inflation since 2000. USA TODAY reported in March that the federal government pays an average of 20% more than private firms for comparable occupations. The analysis did not consider differences in experience and education.
•Total compensation. Federal compensation has grown 36.9% since 2000 after adjusting for inflation, compared with 8.8% for private workers.
see the complete article at USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/income/2010-08-10-1Afedpay10_ST_N.htm
see the complete article here
Friday, August 06, 2010
Virginia Nun killed by illegal alien driver out on dui bail
Virginia Nun killed by illegal alien driver out on dui bail. where is DHS/ ICE?
see complete story at
http://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local-beat/Nun-Killed-in-VA-Crash-99736059.html
see the complete story
see complete story at
http://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local-beat/Nun-Killed-in-VA-Crash-99736059.html
see the complete story
General Motors To Invest $500M In Mexico Plant
More Obama Jobs Creation: General Motors To Invest $500M In Mexico Plant
That's the new and improved -- Obama government-run -- General Motors for you.
MEXICO CITY (Dow Jones)--U.S. automobile giant General Motors Co. said Tuesday it plans to invest close to $500 million in its Ramos Arizpe plant in northern Mexico to produce a new line of engines as well as a new vehicle.
Of that amount, the company is investing $284 million to manufacture eight-cylinder engines with spark-ignition direct-injection technology, known as SIDI, Grace Lieblein, chief executive of GM de Mexico, said at an event.
"We estimate that these technologies allow for a 9% improvement in fuel efficiency from current engines," Lieblein said, adding that the investment will directly create 390 jobs in Coahuila state, where Ramos Arizpe is located.
Another $215 million will go toward upgrading the factory's production lines to build a new vehicle for the domestic and international markets, she said, noting that the investment will be key to maintaining 400 jobs.
Assembly of the vehicle, which wasn't named, is set to begin in the last quarter of 2011. GM plans for it to "give long-term viability to this plant by gradually substituting some production volumes."
Lieblein said General Motors has invested $4.1 billion in Mexico over the last four years.
That's the new and improved -- Obama government-run -- General Motors for you.
MEXICO CITY (Dow Jones)--U.S. automobile giant General Motors Co. said Tuesday it plans to invest close to $500 million in its Ramos Arizpe plant in northern Mexico to produce a new line of engines as well as a new vehicle.
Of that amount, the company is investing $284 million to manufacture eight-cylinder engines with spark-ignition direct-injection technology, known as SIDI, Grace Lieblein, chief executive of GM de Mexico, said at an event.
"We estimate that these technologies allow for a 9% improvement in fuel efficiency from current engines," Lieblein said, adding that the investment will directly create 390 jobs in Coahuila state, where Ramos Arizpe is located.
Another $215 million will go toward upgrading the factory's production lines to build a new vehicle for the domestic and international markets, she said, noting that the investment will be key to maintaining 400 jobs.
Assembly of the vehicle, which wasn't named, is set to begin in the last quarter of 2011. GM plans for it to "give long-term viability to this plant by gradually substituting some production volumes."
Lieblein said General Motors has invested $4.1 billion in Mexico over the last four years.
Laura Ingraham info
Laura Ingraham info
click to visit the Laura Ingraham web site
Editorial Reviews
Product Description
(WASHINGTON, D.C.) On May 20, 2010, Laura Ingraham received a package from an anonymous source that will change the history of the United States and the legacy of President Barack Obama. While retrieving her automobile from the underground garage at the Watergate complex (where she had just enjoyed her weekly pedicure), Ingraham discovered a manila envelope on the hood of her car. When she picked it up, a deep baritone voice called out from a nearby stairwell: "Just read it. You’ll know what to do." The shadowy figure then disappeared into the darkness without another word.
The envelope contained copies of what appeared to be diary entries written by President Barack Obama, his family, and high-ranking administration officials. Because the "diaries" are so revealing, Ingraham felt compelled to release them to the American public and the citizens of the world.
Major media outlets love to describe the president as "no drama Obama," but The Obama Diaries tells a different tale. Through these "diary entries," readers will see past the carefully constructed Obama faÇade to the administration’s true plans to "remake America."
In The Obama Diaries, Ingraham hilariously skewers the president and his minions. She takes aim at:
•the cynical "razzle-dazzle" marketing of Obama’s radical agenda
•the use of the Obama "brand" and family to obscure Obama’s true aims
•Michelle Obama’s gardening and anti-obesity initiative; and much more.
Informative and hugely entertaining, The Obama Diaries will inspire both laughter and critical thinking about the future of the nation and the man currently at the helm.
Excerpts from Laura Ingraham’s The Obama Diaries
Obama on Sarah Palin:
"Hell, doesn’t Palin have anything better to do than criticize me? Shouldn’t she be back home shooting some endangered wolf species from a helicopter?" (April 9, 2010)
Michelle on being First Lady:
"I’ll be damned if all this fabulosity is going to go to waste reading Dr. Seuss to snot-nosed kids all day." (January 23, 2009)
Vice President Joe Biden on Michelle Obama:
"She’s kind of like a black Hillary Clinton. I mean that in a good way." (May 5, 2009)
Obama on his visit to the Vatican:
"If I can ingratiate myself with a few more of these red-hats, the pope thing might not be a bad follow-up to the presidency." (July 10, 2009)
The Obama Diaries
click to visit the Laura Ingraham web site
Editorial Reviews
Product Description
(WASHINGTON, D.C.) On May 20, 2010, Laura Ingraham received a package from an anonymous source that will change the history of the United States and the legacy of President Barack Obama. While retrieving her automobile from the underground garage at the Watergate complex (where she had just enjoyed her weekly pedicure), Ingraham discovered a manila envelope on the hood of her car. When she picked it up, a deep baritone voice called out from a nearby stairwell: "Just read it. You’ll know what to do." The shadowy figure then disappeared into the darkness without another word.
The envelope contained copies of what appeared to be diary entries written by President Barack Obama, his family, and high-ranking administration officials. Because the "diaries" are so revealing, Ingraham felt compelled to release them to the American public and the citizens of the world.
Major media outlets love to describe the president as "no drama Obama," but The Obama Diaries tells a different tale. Through these "diary entries," readers will see past the carefully constructed Obama faÇade to the administration’s true plans to "remake America."
In The Obama Diaries, Ingraham hilariously skewers the president and his minions. She takes aim at:
•the cynical "razzle-dazzle" marketing of Obama’s radical agenda
•the use of the Obama "brand" and family to obscure Obama’s true aims
•Michelle Obama’s gardening and anti-obesity initiative; and much more.
Informative and hugely entertaining, The Obama Diaries will inspire both laughter and critical thinking about the future of the nation and the man currently at the helm.
Excerpts from Laura Ingraham’s The Obama Diaries
Obama on Sarah Palin:
"Hell, doesn’t Palin have anything better to do than criticize me? Shouldn’t she be back home shooting some endangered wolf species from a helicopter?" (April 9, 2010)
Michelle on being First Lady:
"I’ll be damned if all this fabulosity is going to go to waste reading Dr. Seuss to snot-nosed kids all day." (January 23, 2009)
Vice President Joe Biden on Michelle Obama:
"She’s kind of like a black Hillary Clinton. I mean that in a good way." (May 5, 2009)
Obama on his visit to the Vatican:
"If I can ingratiate myself with a few more of these red-hats, the pope thing might not be a bad follow-up to the presidency." (July 10, 2009)
The Obama Diaries
Thursday, August 05, 2010
THE COMING CATASTROPHE: STATE GOVERNMENTS
THE COMING CATASTROPHE: STATE GOVERNMENTS
By DICK MORRIS & EILEEN MCGANN
Published on DickMorris.com on August 5, 2010
As Congress reconvenes next week to pass a $26 billion bailout of state and local governments entombed in their own deficits, we witness a foretaste of the crisis that will be the central event of the first half of next year: the collapse of state governments.
As long as the Democrats control Congress, they will continue to rubber-stamp Obama's requests for bailouts of profligate states. But when the Republicans take control, they will be less than forthcoming. Republicans will ask the central question: Why should taxpayers from states that have cut their budgets and observed spending restraint, pay for the extravagances of the other states? Why should forty-seven states have to pay for California, New York, and Michigan?
State government employment has risen by 16 percent since 1995 and overly generous Medicaid and other spending has climbed alongside it. Pension obligations, initially incurred as a cheap alternative to pay raises for public workers, are increasingly driving state budgets over the brink.
State and local governments and school boards are hostages to the public employee labor unions that control their finances through their contracts and their politics with their donations and votes. These nominally democratic government bodies are as much under the sway of their union captors as the auto companies are of the UAW.
When a Republican Congress turns off the spigot of federal bailouts, the municipal and state bond markets are going to take the hint and stop buying state paper at any interest rate. California will find its debt has become unmarketable and will come begging Congress for relief. First it will seek federal money and then its demands will escalate into a federal guarantee of its state debt.
The Greek financial crisis will come to our shores in the form of state bankruptcies.
Hopefully, Republicans will not be so weak-kneed as they are in the face of the current shortfall and next week's demand for aid. With two Senators caving in, the Democrats were able to pass their aid bill and send it to the House next week.
The Republican solution to state financial distress should be simple: The Party should insist on a change in the federal bankruptcy law providing for a procedure for state bankruptcy (none now exists). This process must call for abrogation of all state and local public employee union contracts as is usually done in private sector bankruptcies. By freeing states and local governments (including school boards) of their union obligations on wages, work rules, staffing, and pensions, they have a chance to survive and, indeed, to prosper. But merely subsidizing these massive expenditures just prolongs the misery of the states in question.
The collapse of overspending state governments must trigger the diminution of the power unions hold over their budgets and their politics. Their coming bankruptcies offer an opportunity for reform and the Republican Congress - backed by newly elected Republican state governments - give us precisely the opportunity we need to effectuate it.
Go to DickMorris.com to read all of Dick's columns!__
By DICK MORRIS & EILEEN MCGANN
Published on DickMorris.com on August 5, 2010
As Congress reconvenes next week to pass a $26 billion bailout of state and local governments entombed in their own deficits, we witness a foretaste of the crisis that will be the central event of the first half of next year: the collapse of state governments.
As long as the Democrats control Congress, they will continue to rubber-stamp Obama's requests for bailouts of profligate states. But when the Republicans take control, they will be less than forthcoming. Republicans will ask the central question: Why should taxpayers from states that have cut their budgets and observed spending restraint, pay for the extravagances of the other states? Why should forty-seven states have to pay for California, New York, and Michigan?
State government employment has risen by 16 percent since 1995 and overly generous Medicaid and other spending has climbed alongside it. Pension obligations, initially incurred as a cheap alternative to pay raises for public workers, are increasingly driving state budgets over the brink.
State and local governments and school boards are hostages to the public employee labor unions that control their finances through their contracts and their politics with their donations and votes. These nominally democratic government bodies are as much under the sway of their union captors as the auto companies are of the UAW.
When a Republican Congress turns off the spigot of federal bailouts, the municipal and state bond markets are going to take the hint and stop buying state paper at any interest rate. California will find its debt has become unmarketable and will come begging Congress for relief. First it will seek federal money and then its demands will escalate into a federal guarantee of its state debt.
The Greek financial crisis will come to our shores in the form of state bankruptcies.
Hopefully, Republicans will not be so weak-kneed as they are in the face of the current shortfall and next week's demand for aid. With two Senators caving in, the Democrats were able to pass their aid bill and send it to the House next week.
The Republican solution to state financial distress should be simple: The Party should insist on a change in the federal bankruptcy law providing for a procedure for state bankruptcy (none now exists). This process must call for abrogation of all state and local public employee union contracts as is usually done in private sector bankruptcies. By freeing states and local governments (including school boards) of their union obligations on wages, work rules, staffing, and pensions, they have a chance to survive and, indeed, to prosper. But merely subsidizing these massive expenditures just prolongs the misery of the states in question.
The collapse of overspending state governments must trigger the diminution of the power unions hold over their budgets and their politics. Their coming bankruptcies offer an opportunity for reform and the Republican Congress - backed by newly elected Republican state governments - give us precisely the opportunity we need to effectuate it.
Go to DickMorris.com to read all of Dick's columns!__
GM to Build New Vehicle at Plant in Ramos Arispe Mexico
GM to Build New Vehicle at Plant in Mexico
yout tax dollars at work ?
Will invest $500 million at plant in Ramos Arispe
General Motors will invest $500 million to produce a new vehicle and eight-cylinder engines in a plant in northeastern Mexico, a company spokesman said on August 4.
The decision was announced at a meeting on August 3 between GM management and Mexican officials, the spokesman said, without giving details of the new vehicle.
The investment in the GM plant in Ramos Arispe, Coahuila state, would generate 390 jobs, he added.
General Motors has been present in Mexico since 1935, where it has some 11,000 workers, four factories, an engineering center and a test circuit.
Wednesday, August 04, 2010
By Agence France-Presse
this new items appeared on the glenn beck show 8/5/10
www.glennbeck.com
yout tax dollars at work ?
Will invest $500 million at plant in Ramos Arispe
General Motors will invest $500 million to produce a new vehicle and eight-cylinder engines in a plant in northeastern Mexico, a company spokesman said on August 4.
The decision was announced at a meeting on August 3 between GM management and Mexican officials, the spokesman said, without giving details of the new vehicle.
The investment in the GM plant in Ramos Arispe, Coahuila state, would generate 390 jobs, he added.
General Motors has been present in Mexico since 1935, where it has some 11,000 workers, four factories, an engineering center and a test circuit.
Wednesday, August 04, 2010
By Agence France-Presse
this new items appeared on the glenn beck show 8/5/10
www.glennbeck.com
$10K Powerball lotto winner in Kennewick Washington
$10K Powerball lotto winner in Kennewick
08/03/10 Lynn Shook won a $10,000 Powerball jackpot.
The Yoke's Fresh Market 1410 W 27TH AVE in Kennewick sold this Powerball winning ticket.
click to see more Washington lotto info data and stats
Wednesday, August 04, 2010
see that confused California Rep Pete Stark only atheist in Congress
see that confused California Rep Pete Stark
http://www.goldengateminutemen.org/
is Rep Pete Stark the only atheist in Congress ?
Citizenship is for you, me, our children and selected immigrants from other Nations. Our mission is to STOP the illegal immigration epidemic
by holding politicians accountable to Federal immigration laws, and educating our fellow citizens to do the same.
http://www.goldengateminutemen.org/
is Rep Pete Stark the only atheist in Congress ?
Citizenship is for you, me, our children and selected immigrants from other Nations. Our mission is to STOP the illegal immigration epidemic
by holding politicians accountable to Federal immigration laws, and educating our fellow citizens to do the same.
Tuesday, August 03, 2010
Illegal immigrant crashes DUI, killing Va. Catholic nun plus injures 2 others
Police: Illegal immigrant crashes, killing Va. nun
WASHINGTON – An illegal immigrant awaiting a deportation ruling has been charged with killing a nun and critically injuring two others in a drunken driving crash that has sparked criticism of how immigration enforcement is handled.
A local official in the Virginia suburb where the crash happened and a congressman from another state have criticized federal officials for not removing the suspect from the country after previous arrests, and even U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano questioned why his deportation was taking so long. A spokeswoman for the nuns' order, meanwhile, said they're upset that the tragedy is being politicized.
Twenty-three-year-old Carlos Martinelly Montano, who police say is illegally in the country, is charged with drunken driving, involuntary manslaughter and felony driving on a revoked license after the accident on Sunday in Virginia's Prince William County. Montano was arrested two times before and charged with drunken driving, according to county police, and has also been arrested in separate incidents for other traffic-related offenses. Police say Montano, who is from Bolivia, was turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement after at least one arrest, and a prosecutor said he knew of at least one other occasion he'd been referred to immigration officials.
The Department of Homeland Security said Tuesday that Montano was released in 2008, pending an immigration judge's review of his case. As of August 2010, a judge had not ruled on his deportation.
U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano called the crash a "terrible thing" when asked about the incident during an unrelated news conference at D.C. police headquarters Tuesday. Napolitano said she immediately asked officials to look into the situation.
"This is a horrible case," said Napolitano, whose department includes ICE. "Why is it that this individual was still out driving? He was in removal proceedings. Why were the removal proceedings taking so long?"
Prince William County's top elected leader and a Kentucky congressman, both Republicans, criticized federal immigration officials for not deporting Montano.
"As the facts surrounding this tragic case continue to come to light, I think it demonstrates the need for ICE to be more efficient and effective in their deportation duties," Kentucky Congressman Hal Rogers said in an e-mailed statement.
Corey Stewart, the chairman of Prince William County's Board of Supervisors, says the accident highlights the need for federal immigration reform. Stewart championed and implemented one of the nation's strictest county-level anti-illegal immigration policies. The local law requires that police inquire about the immigration status of all people arrested on suspicion of violating a state or local law. He says it's "extremely frustrating" that even with the county's policy, not all those turned over to ICE are removed from the country.
"We handed him over to the feds assuming he would be deported, but instead federal authorities released him back into the neighborhood and he killed a nun," Stewart said. "We feel like we are beating our heads against the wall."
A Catholic nun and spokeswoman for the Benedictine Sisters of Virginia says sisters of the three nuns involved in the accident have always stayed out of the debate over immigration. Sister Glenna Smith says the Catholic nuns have always provided social services — including adult literacy courses and counseling — regardless of immigration status, and they are upset the tragedy has become fodder for policy debate.
"The Benedictine Sisters are dismayed and saddened that this tragedy has been politicized and become an apparent forum for the illegal immigration agenda," Smith said. "It is not optional for us to choose mercy and forgiveness. We know this young man will be brought to justice, that's appropriate, and we hope he will learn to make better choices."
Montano's car crossed a median Sunday morning when it hit the car carrying three nuns, police said. Sixty-six-year-old Sister Denise Mosier was pronounced dead on the scene, and two other nuns — Sister Charlotte Lange and Sister Connie Ruth Lupton — were critically injured and remained in a hospital on respirators Tuesday, according to Smith.
It wasn't clear from jail records if Montano had an attorney.
By KATHLEEN MILLER, Associated Press Writer Kathleen Miller, Associated Press Writer
Tue Aug 3, 6:54 pm ET
WASHINGTON – An illegal immigrant awaiting a deportation ruling has been charged with killing a nun and critically injuring two others in a drunken driving crash that has sparked criticism of how immigration enforcement is handled.
A local official in the Virginia suburb where the crash happened and a congressman from another state have criticized federal officials for not removing the suspect from the country after previous arrests, and even U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano questioned why his deportation was taking so long. A spokeswoman for the nuns' order, meanwhile, said they're upset that the tragedy is being politicized.
Twenty-three-year-old Carlos Martinelly Montano, who police say is illegally in the country, is charged with drunken driving, involuntary manslaughter and felony driving on a revoked license after the accident on Sunday in Virginia's Prince William County. Montano was arrested two times before and charged with drunken driving, according to county police, and has also been arrested in separate incidents for other traffic-related offenses. Police say Montano, who is from Bolivia, was turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement after at least one arrest, and a prosecutor said he knew of at least one other occasion he'd been referred to immigration officials.
The Department of Homeland Security said Tuesday that Montano was released in 2008, pending an immigration judge's review of his case. As of August 2010, a judge had not ruled on his deportation.
U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano called the crash a "terrible thing" when asked about the incident during an unrelated news conference at D.C. police headquarters Tuesday. Napolitano said she immediately asked officials to look into the situation.
"This is a horrible case," said Napolitano, whose department includes ICE. "Why is it that this individual was still out driving? He was in removal proceedings. Why were the removal proceedings taking so long?"
Prince William County's top elected leader and a Kentucky congressman, both Republicans, criticized federal immigration officials for not deporting Montano.
"As the facts surrounding this tragic case continue to come to light, I think it demonstrates the need for ICE to be more efficient and effective in their deportation duties," Kentucky Congressman Hal Rogers said in an e-mailed statement.
Corey Stewart, the chairman of Prince William County's Board of Supervisors, says the accident highlights the need for federal immigration reform. Stewart championed and implemented one of the nation's strictest county-level anti-illegal immigration policies. The local law requires that police inquire about the immigration status of all people arrested on suspicion of violating a state or local law. He says it's "extremely frustrating" that even with the county's policy, not all those turned over to ICE are removed from the country.
"We handed him over to the feds assuming he would be deported, but instead federal authorities released him back into the neighborhood and he killed a nun," Stewart said. "We feel like we are beating our heads against the wall."
A Catholic nun and spokeswoman for the Benedictine Sisters of Virginia says sisters of the three nuns involved in the accident have always stayed out of the debate over immigration. Sister Glenna Smith says the Catholic nuns have always provided social services — including adult literacy courses and counseling — regardless of immigration status, and they are upset the tragedy has become fodder for policy debate.
"The Benedictine Sisters are dismayed and saddened that this tragedy has been politicized and become an apparent forum for the illegal immigration agenda," Smith said. "It is not optional for us to choose mercy and forgiveness. We know this young man will be brought to justice, that's appropriate, and we hope he will learn to make better choices."
Montano's car crossed a median Sunday morning when it hit the car carrying three nuns, police said. Sixty-six-year-old Sister Denise Mosier was pronounced dead on the scene, and two other nuns — Sister Charlotte Lange and Sister Connie Ruth Lupton — were critically injured and remained in a hospital on respirators Tuesday, according to Smith.
It wasn't clear from jail records if Montano had an attorney.
By KATHLEEN MILLER, Associated Press Writer Kathleen Miller, Associated Press Writer
Tue Aug 3, 6:54 pm ET
is Rep Pete Stark the only atheist in Congress ?
is Rep Pete Stark the only atheist in Congress ?
Pete Stark, Jr is a Democratic member of the U.S. House of Representatives,
representing California's 13th congressional district in southwestern Alameda County. The 13th district includes Alameda, Union City, Hayward, Newark, San Leandro and Fremont, as well as parts of Oakland and Pleasanton.
Stark said................
"[I am a] Unitarian who does not believe in a Supreme Being. I look forward
to working with the Secular Coalition to stop the promotion of narrow religious beliefs in science, marriage contracts, the military and the provision of social service." Statement from Stark, January 2007
Pete Stark, Jr is a Democratic member of the U.S. House of Representatives,
representing California's 13th congressional district in southwestern Alameda County. The 13th district includes Alameda, Union City, Hayward, Newark, San Leandro and Fremont, as well as parts of Oakland and Pleasanton.
Stark said................
"[I am a] Unitarian who does not believe in a Supreme Being. I look forward
to working with the Secular Coalition to stop the promotion of narrow religious beliefs in science, marriage contracts, the military and the provision of social service." Statement from Stark, January 2007
Summertime Blues by Senator John Mccain Senator Tom Coburn
There They Go Again: Two Senators Continue False and Misleading Attacks on Recovery Act
This morning two senators—John McCain and Tom Coburn—released their third report critiquing 100 Recovery Act projects. And just like the last two, this one was an inaccurate and misleading attack on programs that are putting Americans to work across the nation. I’ll present some details in a moment, but it’s very unfortunate that, once again, instead of trying to help create the conditions for stronger growth, to help build on the momentum of the Recovery Act, McCain and Coburn spend their valuable time cooking up phony critiques and, with their Republican colleagues, blocking votes of even bipartisan measures to help small businesses.
Let’s start with the bigger picture. Just last week two prominent, independent economists released a rigorous study on how actions by the government (and the Federal Reserve), including the Recovery Act, helped to end the Great Recession. One of the authors—Mark Zandi—was one of McCain’s top advisers during his presidential bid. He and Alan Blinder (a former vice-chairman of the Federal Reserve) found that the Recovery Act has created or saved about 2.7 million jobs so far, and shaved about a point and a half off of the unemployment rate.
These jobs are the result of over 70,000 projects in action around the country, of grants to states supporting jobs of teachers, police, and firefighters, of tax cuts for working households, loans to small businesses, and investments in innovative new industries producing advanced batteries, clean energy, and much more. They’ve helped reverse a situation where last year, we were losing millions of private sector jobs; in the first half of this year, we’ve added 593,000 private sector jobs.
Now, we’re always glad to take a second look at projects when concerns are raised. In fact, there’s never been a stimulus program of this magnitude with anywhere near the amount of oversight that’s been brought to bear on the Recovery Act. And when we find a problem, we fix it. We’ve shut down hundreds of projects that weren’t delivering the goods.
But the inaccuracy of McCain/Coburn in this regard renders this report just as unreliable as the last two. We followed up the projects in those reports, and found half of their claims to be flat-out false or misleading. Many of the others criticized worthwhile, job-creating projects. Check out this link and you’ll see that news outlets like CNN have debunked their claims in the past, often by simply going to the folks who were working on the project and learning about it:
In the current report, our review so far finds that five of the 100 projects are not even Recovery Act projects. And others are just blatantly wrong on the facts. Take for example an award that McCain and Coburn describe as “funding a WNBA Practice Facility,” when in fact the award is building a tribal government center that will create education and health facilities while also creating hundreds of jobs. Moreover, the tribe has agreed to disallow any commercial use of the facility.
One of their top critiques in the new report is a clean energy program in California that’s put about 50 people to work so far, expects to create 1,500 construction jobs, and then 500 permanent green jobs after that. Gov. Schwarzenegger praised the program, as did the Chamber of Commerce. What would McCain and Coburn say to these workers? That they shouldn’t have this opportunity? That they should go back to the jobless roles? That building a clean energy future is the wrong way to go?
What ideas does Senator Coburn have to offer to the 35,000 people working in Oklahoma who wouldn’t be there without the Recovery Act? What about the 64,000 Arizonans at work because of the Act?
Instead of answers, we’re left with a partisan attack contradicted by one of the author’s own former advisers. But that’s not all. We’re also left with a choice.
The President has shown he is willing to work with anyone who will join us to figure out new ways to create more jobs. The Vice-President spends each week making sure we’re squeezing job out of every Recovery Act dollar. Meanwhile, Republicans are blocking an up or down vote on a package of bipartisan proposals that would cut taxes for small businesses and allow them access to capital through community banks. It’s incredible, when you think about it: last week as they were working to turn out this hit-job of a report, these same two senators were voting against helping small businesses expand and create jobs.
Yes, we must carefully evaluate our progress, but we must do so without partisan thumbs on the scale. In that regard, the report these two senators are touting today is not a road map forward. To the contrary, it is one back to the failed policies that got us into this mess. We’ve tried that route. We cannot afford to go back there again.
Jared Bernstein is Chief Economic Advisor to the Vice President
Posted by Jared Bernstein on August 03, 2010 at 09:53 AM EDT
This morning two senators—John McCain and Tom Coburn—released their third report critiquing 100 Recovery Act projects. And just like the last two, this one was an inaccurate and misleading attack on programs that are putting Americans to work across the nation. I’ll present some details in a moment, but it’s very unfortunate that, once again, instead of trying to help create the conditions for stronger growth, to help build on the momentum of the Recovery Act, McCain and Coburn spend their valuable time cooking up phony critiques and, with their Republican colleagues, blocking votes of even bipartisan measures to help small businesses.
Let’s start with the bigger picture. Just last week two prominent, independent economists released a rigorous study on how actions by the government (and the Federal Reserve), including the Recovery Act, helped to end the Great Recession. One of the authors—Mark Zandi—was one of McCain’s top advisers during his presidential bid. He and Alan Blinder (a former vice-chairman of the Federal Reserve) found that the Recovery Act has created or saved about 2.7 million jobs so far, and shaved about a point and a half off of the unemployment rate.
These jobs are the result of over 70,000 projects in action around the country, of grants to states supporting jobs of teachers, police, and firefighters, of tax cuts for working households, loans to small businesses, and investments in innovative new industries producing advanced batteries, clean energy, and much more. They’ve helped reverse a situation where last year, we were losing millions of private sector jobs; in the first half of this year, we’ve added 593,000 private sector jobs.
Now, we’re always glad to take a second look at projects when concerns are raised. In fact, there’s never been a stimulus program of this magnitude with anywhere near the amount of oversight that’s been brought to bear on the Recovery Act. And when we find a problem, we fix it. We’ve shut down hundreds of projects that weren’t delivering the goods.
But the inaccuracy of McCain/Coburn in this regard renders this report just as unreliable as the last two. We followed up the projects in those reports, and found half of their claims to be flat-out false or misleading. Many of the others criticized worthwhile, job-creating projects. Check out this link and you’ll see that news outlets like CNN have debunked their claims in the past, often by simply going to the folks who were working on the project and learning about it:
In the current report, our review so far finds that five of the 100 projects are not even Recovery Act projects. And others are just blatantly wrong on the facts. Take for example an award that McCain and Coburn describe as “funding a WNBA Practice Facility,” when in fact the award is building a tribal government center that will create education and health facilities while also creating hundreds of jobs. Moreover, the tribe has agreed to disallow any commercial use of the facility.
One of their top critiques in the new report is a clean energy program in California that’s put about 50 people to work so far, expects to create 1,500 construction jobs, and then 500 permanent green jobs after that. Gov. Schwarzenegger praised the program, as did the Chamber of Commerce. What would McCain and Coburn say to these workers? That they shouldn’t have this opportunity? That they should go back to the jobless roles? That building a clean energy future is the wrong way to go?
What ideas does Senator Coburn have to offer to the 35,000 people working in Oklahoma who wouldn’t be there without the Recovery Act? What about the 64,000 Arizonans at work because of the Act?
Instead of answers, we’re left with a partisan attack contradicted by one of the author’s own former advisers. But that’s not all. We’re also left with a choice.
The President has shown he is willing to work with anyone who will join us to figure out new ways to create more jobs. The Vice-President spends each week making sure we’re squeezing job out of every Recovery Act dollar. Meanwhile, Republicans are blocking an up or down vote on a package of bipartisan proposals that would cut taxes for small businesses and allow them access to capital through community banks. It’s incredible, when you think about it: last week as they were working to turn out this hit-job of a report, these same two senators were voting against helping small businesses expand and create jobs.
Yes, we must carefully evaluate our progress, but we must do so without partisan thumbs on the scale. In that regard, the report these two senators are touting today is not a road map forward. To the contrary, it is one back to the failed policies that got us into this mess. We’ve tried that route. We cannot afford to go back there again.
Jared Bernstein is Chief Economic Advisor to the Vice President
Posted by Jared Bernstein on August 03, 2010 at 09:53 AM EDT
Monday, August 02, 2010
The American Patriot's Bible: The Word of God and the Shaping of America
The American Patriot's Bible: The Word of God and the Shaping of America
Description of the The American Patriot's Bible
THE ONE BIBLE THAT SHOWS HOW 'A LIGHT FROM ABOVE' SHAPED OUR NATION. Never has a version of the Bible targeted the spiritual needs of those who love our country more than The American Patriot's Bible. This extremely unique Bible shows how the history of the United States connects the people and events of the Bible to our lives in a modern world. The story of the United States is wonderfully woven into the teachings of the Bible and includes a beautiful full-color family record section, memorable images from our nation's history and hundreds of enlightening articles which complement the New King James Version Bible text.
as mentioned on the glennbeck.com tv show n fox
The American Patriot's Bible: The Word of God and the Shaping of America
Sunday, August 01, 2010
Troops need you web site
Troops Need You
Q. Can I contribute to a specific unit or troop?
A. Of course, Troops Need You personalizes the support relationship. Just go to the profile of the unit or troop you want to support and become their Battle Buddy by contributing there. Or, go to the donate page and contribute to the general fund.
Q. I already send care packages to troops. How is this different?
A. Troops Need You enables Americans to go beyond the care package and the bumper sticker, by delivering supplies that make a difference in their mission and their lives.
What is your question? Send to TroopsNeedYou (at) gmail.com
visit the Troops need you web site
http://troopsneedyou.com/
Q. Can I contribute to a specific unit or troop?
A. Of course, Troops Need You personalizes the support relationship. Just go to the profile of the unit or troop you want to support and become their Battle Buddy by contributing there. Or, go to the donate page and contribute to the general fund.
Q. I already send care packages to troops. How is this different?
A. Troops Need You enables Americans to go beyond the care package and the bumper sticker, by delivering supplies that make a difference in their mission and their lives.
What is your question? Send to TroopsNeedYou (at) gmail.com
visit the Troops need you web site
http://troopsneedyou.com/
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