Today we read about thousands of Hispanics not showing up to work in Alabama nor allowing their children to attend school in an apparent protest over that states tough illegal immigration law (HB 56). It is estimated that most of those who participated in this protest were in fact “Illegal Immigrants”. We also heard today that the Obama Administration have announced their plan to suspend the deportation orders of 300,000 illegal aliens that have already been issued by a U.S. court of law. In addition to being allowed to stay in the country, each of these 300,000 illegal aliens will also be eligible for temporary work visas. All of this is happening in an atmosphere where we have over 14 million unemployed American citizens (21 million if you count the long term chronic unemployed). Alabama has seen a 480% increase in illegal immigrants between 2000 and 2010. Officials in Alabama estimate that as many as 160,000 illegal immigrants have moved into the state and that their presence has cost Alabama more than $300 million/year. Even worse, their presence in the work place has taken jobs away from U.S. citizens in Alabama. Alabama officials report that since enacting HB 56 a large number of illegal’s have left the state thus opening up jobs for American Citizens. They contend that the law is having its intended affect. However, the DOJ and other groups have filed a suit attempting to stop and remove HB 56. It would appear that Obama is more interested in securing the Hispanic Vote than allowing American Citizens to find jobs. The DOJ has sued Arizona and has started suit against South Carolina who has passed a similar law to Alabama. I think it’s clear where Obama’s loyalties lie and they are not with the American Citizens in Alabama, South Carolina and Arizona.
Dan Watson
Gilbert
Cerulean posted at 1:43 pm on Mon, Oct 17, 2011.
Half truths, miss-truths and damned lies will get you published in the Tribune, Dan Watson, but it does not make your letter accurate.
" The Obama administration said Thursday it will indefinitely delay deporting many illegal immigrants who don’t have criminal records and will offer them a chance to apply for a work permit. The government will focus on sending back convicted criminals and those who might be a national security or public safety threat.
The policy change will mean a case-by-case review of approximately 300,000 illegal immigrants facing possible deportation in federal immigration courts, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said." The Associated Press
truth posted at 2:14 pm on Mon, Oct 17, 2011.
Dan Watson forgot one very important argument, Eight years of a Republican President,with six years of a Republican congress. the only illegal action taken was when G.W.Bush bragged even illegals can buy a homes in the U.S.
JSBeals posted at 4:11 pm on Mon, Oct 17, 2011.
I don't know why the Tribune would allow the title "Obama attacking Americans". When will responsible journalism take more care in their communication with their readers?
Mr. Watson, what jobs are the illegals taking away from Americans? Even in these tough times very few Americans will do the jobs that the illegal immigrants are willing to do in our vegetable and fruit industries as well as the livestock slaughtering industries. The President is well aware that deportation of large numbers of illegals will only raise the price on the products associated with these industries. Crops are rotting in the fields in Georgia because of their new immigration laws. We have to be sensible and think clearly about these things instead of rushing to judgment. Glad to see some might get work visas, i.e. documentation.
PatrioticPerson posted at 6:16 pm on Mon, Oct 17, 2011.
Finger pointing......blame game....accusations.....half truths....but NO SOLUTION. And there won't be a solultion until there is a full scale confrontation of the elected officials by the very people that put them in power.
Dale Whiting posted at 7:45 pm on Mon, Oct 17, 2011.
Dan,
Looks like you drew one heck of a lot of criticism! Better luck next time!
Rich posted at 10:33 pm on Mon, Oct 17, 2011.
Actually Dan, if you will review the facts what you will find is that Alabama's law has worked out to be an economic disaster for the state. But I'll leave you to look that up before you pop off again. "...there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong." H. L. Mencken, as you so eloquently prove, once again.
A_Rose_By_Any_Other_Name posted at 7:30 am on Tue, Oct 18, 2011.
I see all the La Ratza supporters have voiced their contempt for the rule of law again. One of you even came up with the time honored statement that it's all Bush's fault again. JSBeals is still on the delusion that illegals just do the jobs Americans wont do. Very true, Why should they when they get their money from entitlements. Why work hard when you can get your money from Obama's stash. Call it Bush's stash if that makes you feel any better truth. Get rid of the illegals and free money for sitting on your duff, and Americans will do a lot of hard work to feed their fat behinds plus even lose a few pounds of lard. It's not going to be easy turning this country back to the hard working dynamo that it once was. Ridding ourselves of the invasion of illegals is a good first step. Trimming out the fat from entitlement programs will be a good second step. Time to go to work you fat lazy slobs!
A_Rose_By_Any_Other_Name posted at 7:34 am on Tue, Oct 18, 2011.
If you want to see the whole picture read this. It is what Obozo and the rest of the progressive (democrat) socialists have been working towards for a long time now.
Cloward-Piven is a strategy for forcing political change through orchestrated crisis.
The strategy was first proposed in 1966 by Columbia University political scientists Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven as a plan to bankrupt the welfare system and produce radical change. Sometimes known as the "crisis strategy" or the the "flood-the-rolls, bankrupt-the-cities strategy," the Cloward-Piven approach called for swamping the welfare rolls with new applicants - more than the system could bear. It was hoped that the resulting economic collapse would lead to political turmoil and ultimately socialism.
The National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), founded by African-American militant George Alvin Wiley, put the Cloward-Piven strategy to work in the streets. Its activities led directly to the welfare crisis that bankrupted New York City in 1975.
Veterans of NWRO went on to found the Living Wage Movement and the Voting Rights Movement, both of which rely on the Cloward-Piven strategy and both of which are spear-headed by the radical cult ACORN.
Both the Living Wage and Voting Rights movements depend heavily on financial support from George Soros's Open Society Institute.
On August 11, 1965, the black district of Watts in Los Angeles exploded into violence, after police used batons to subdue a man suspected of drunk driving. Riots raged for six days, spilling over into other parts of the city, and leaving 34 dead. Two Columbia University sociologists, Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven were inspired by the riots to develop a new strategy for social change. In November 1965 - barely three months after the fires of Watts had subsided - Cloward and Piven began privately circulating copies of an article they had written called "Mobilizing the Poor: How it Could Be Done." Six months later (on May 2, 1966), it was published in The Nation, under the title, "The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty."
The article electrified the Left. Following its May 2, 1966 publication, The Nation sold an unprecedented 30,000 reprints. Activists were abuzz over the so-called "crisis strategy" or "Cloward-Piven strategy," as it came to be called. Many were eager to put it into effect.
Richard A. Cloward was then a professor of social work at Columbia University. He died in 2001. His co-author Frances Fox Piven was a research associate at Columbia's School of Social Work. She now holds a Distinguished Professorship of Political Science and Sociology at the City University of New York.
In their 1966 article, Cloward and Piven charged that the ruling classes used welfare to weaken the poor. By providing a social safety net, the rich doused the fires of rebellion. Cloward and Piven wanted to fan those flames. Poor people can advance only when "the rest of society is afraid of them," Cloward told The New York Times on September 27, 1970. Rather than placating the poor with government hand-outs, activists should work to sabotage and destroy the welfare system. The collapse of the welfare state would ignite a political and financial crisis that would rock the nation. Poor people would rise in revolt. Only then would "the rest of society" accept their demands. So wrote Cloward and Piven in 1966.
The key to sparking this rebellion would be to expose the inadequacy of the welfare state. This Cloward and Piven proposed to do, in classic Alinsky fashion, by forcing welfare bureaucrats to live up to their own book of rules.
The authors noted that the number of Americans subsisting on welfare - about 8 million, at the time - probably represented less than half the number who were technically eligible for full benefits. They proposed a "massive drive to recruit the poor onto the welfare rolls." Cloward and Piven calculated that persuading even a fraction of potential welfare recipients to demand their entitlements would bankrupt the system. The result, they predicted, would be "a profound financial and political crisis" that would unleash "powerful forces… for major economic reform at the national level."
Their article called for "cadres of aggressive organizers" to use "demonstrations to create a climate of militancy." Intimidated by black violence, politicians would appeal to the federal government for help. Carefully orchestrated media campaigns, carried out by friendly, leftwing journalists, would float the idea of a "a federal program of income redistribution," in the form of a guaranteed living income for all; working and non-working people alike. Local officials would clutch at this idea like drowning men to a lifeline. They would apply pressure on Washington to implement it. With every major city erupting into chaos, Washington would have to act.
The Cloward-Piven strategy never achieved its goal of system breakdown and a Marxist utopia. But it provided a blueprint for some of the Left's most destructive campaigns of the next three decades. It will likely haunt America for years to come since George Soros' Shadow Party has now adopted the strategy, honing it into a far more efficient weapon than any of its Sixties-era promoters could have foreseen.
Cloward and Piven recruited a militant black organizer named George Wiley to lead their new movement. For more information on Wiley and his welfare rights movement. In the summer of 1967, Wiley founded the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), with headquarters in Washington, DC. Wiley's tactics closely followed the recommendations set out in Cloward and Piven's article. His followers invaded welfare offices across the nation - often violently - bullying social workers and loudly demanding every penny to which the law "entitled" them. By 1969, NWRO claimed a dues-paying membership of 22,500 families, with 523 chapters across the nation.
Regarding Wiley's tactics, The New York Times commented on September 27, 1970, "There have been sit-ins in legislative chambers, including a United States Senate committee hearing, mass demonstrations of several thousand welfare recipients, school boycotts, picket lines, mounted police, tear gas, arrests - and, on occasion, rock-throwing, smashed glass doors, overturned desks, scattered papers and ripped-out phones."
These methods proved effective. "The flooding succeeded beyond Wiley's wildest dreams," writes Sol Stern in the Manhattan Institute's City Journal. "From 1965 to 1974, the number of single-parent households on welfare soared from 4.3 million to 10.8 million, despite mostly flush economic times. By the early 1970s, one person was on the welfare rolls in New York City for every two working in the city's private economy."
As a direct result of its reckless welfare spending, New York City - the financial capital of the world - was forced to declare bankruptcy in 1975. The entire state of New York nearly went down with it. Leftist agitators swooned in triumph. The Cloward-Piven strategy had proved its effectiveness.
The Backlash
The Cloward-Piven strategy depended on surprise. Once society recovered from the initial shock, the backlash began. New York's welfare crisis horrified the nation, giving rise to a reform movement which culminated in "the end of welfare as we know it" -- the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which imposed time limits on federal welfare, along with strict eligibility and work requirements. Both Cloward and Piven attended the White House signing of the bill as guests of President Clinton.
Most Americans to this day have never heard of Cloward and Piven. But Mayor Rudolph Giuliani attempted to expose them in the late 1990's. As his drive for welfare reform heated up, Giuliani accused the militant scholars by name, citing their 1966 manifesto as evidence that they had engaged in deliberate economic sabotage. "This wasn't an accident," Giuliani charged in a 1997 speech. "It wasn't an atmospheric thing, it wasn't supernatural. This is the result of policies and programs designed to have the maximum number of people get on welfare."
Cloward and Piven never again revealed their intentions as candidly as they had in their 1966 article. They learned to cover their tracks. Even so, their activism in subsequent years continued to rely on the tactic of overloading the system. When the public caught on to their welfare scheme, Cloward and Piven simply moved on, applying pressure to other sectors of the bureaucracy, wherever they detected weakness.
The Cloward-Piven strategy - first proposed in 1966 - seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse. Application of this strategy contributed greatly to the turmoil of the late Sixties. Cloward-Piven failed to usher in socialism, but it succeeded in generating an economic crisis and in escalating the level of political violence in America - two cherished goals of hard-Left strategists.
Radical organizers today continue tinkering with variations on the Cloward-Piven theme, in the perennial hope of reproducing '60s-style chaos. The thuggish behavior of leftwing unions such as SEIU and of certain elements of George Soros' Shadow Party can be traced, in a direct line of descent, from the early practitioners of Cloward-Piven.
Cloward-Piven's early promoters cited radical organizer Saul Alinsky as their inspiration. "Make the enemy live up to their (sic) own book of rules," Alinsky wrote in his "1989" (??)
book Rules for Radicals. When pressed to honor every jot and tittle of every law and statute; every Judaeo-Christian moral tenet; and every implicit promise of the liberal social contract, human agencies inevitably fall short. The system's failure to "live up" to its rule book can then be used to discredit it altogether, and to replace the capitalist "rule book" with a socialist one.
In its earliest form, the Cloward-Piven strategy applied Alinsky's principle to the specific area of welfare entitlements. It counseled activists to create what might be called Trojan Horse movements - mass movements whose outward purpose seemed to be providing material help to the downtrodden, but whose real purpose was to draft poor people into service as revolutionary foot soldiers.
The specific function of these Trojan Horse movements was to mobilize poor people en masse to overwhelm government agencies with a flood of demands beyond the capacity of those agencies to meet. The flood of demands was calculated to break the budget, jam the bureaucratic gears into gridlock, and bring the system crashing down. Fear, turmoil, violence and economic collapse would accompany such a breakdown - providing perfect conditions for fostering radical change. That, at least, was the theory behind the Cloward-Piven strategy.
In 1982, partisans of the Cloward-Piven strategy founded a new "voting rights movement," which purported to take up the unfinished work of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Like ACORN, the organization that spear-headed this campaign, the new "voting rights" movement was led by veterans of George Wiley's welfare rights crusade. Its flagship organizations were Project Vote and Human SERVE, both founded in 1982. Project Vote is an ACORN front group, launched by former NWRO organizer and ACORN co-founder Zach Polett. Human SERVE was founded by Richard A. Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, along with a former NWRO organizer named Hulbert James.
All three of these organizations - ACORN, Project Vote and Human SERVE - set to work lobbying energetically for the so-called Motor-Voter law, which Bill Clinton ultimately signed in 1993. The Motor-Voter bill is widely blamed today for swamping the voter rolls with "dead wood" - invalid registrations signed in the name of deceased, ineligible or non-existent people - thus opening the door to the unprecedented levels of voter fraud and "voter disenfranchisement" claims that followed in subsequent elections.
The new "voting rights" coalition combines mass voter registration drives - typically featuring high levels of fraud - with systematic intimidation of election officials in the form of frivolous lawsuits, bogus charges of "racism" and "disenfranchisement" and "direct action" (street protests, violent or otherwise). Just as they swamped America's welfare offices in the 1960s, the Cloward-Piven team now seeks to overwhelm the nation's understaffed and poorly policed electoral system. Their antics set the stage for the Florida recount crisis of 2000, and have introduced a level of fear, tension and foreboding to U.S. elections heretofore encountered mainly in Third World countries. For more information on the Voting Rights Movement, see the entry for "Project Vote."
Both the Living Wage and Voting Rights movements depend heavily on financial support from George Soros's Open Society Institute. It is largely thanks to money from Soros that the Cloward-Piven strategy continues even now to eat away at America's political and economic infrastructure.
hoopydreams posted at 8:16 am on Tue, Oct 18, 2011.
My bone to pick is not with illegal immigration, but with these Americans who are out of jobs. Did you know that right now in Alabama the produce on those crops are rotting in the fields? Food, our food is just sitting in the fields because there is no one to pick the crops. Americans who are currently out of jobs feel they are "too good" to go and pick crops out in the hot fields. They are too good to work for less than minimum wage to bus tables, work in fast food, or as line cooks. I know if I was out of a job, I would do anything in order to put food on the table. Illegals are in high demand and an "issue" in the US because most Americans feel they are too good for low paying, labor intensive jobs like picking crops. So before everyone blames Obama or as "A_Rose..." puts it Obozo, we need to ask ourselves who gave the "illegals" the opportunities to work these jobs: Answer: our own laziness.
sockratties posted at 8:17 am on Tue, Oct 18, 2011.
Rosy...
Your comment might have made you seem somewhat intelligent except it is a direct word-for-word quote from Tea Party In The Hills website who copied it from several other Cloward-Piven sites.
Next time you post an idea you might make it your own, if you're not too lazy. And might I suggest a little more fiber? Maybe you won't be so cranky.
In_God_We_Trust posted at 12:02 pm on Tue, Oct 18, 2011.
sockrat, wherever she got it, it must ring true as you didn't discount it.
Right hoopydreams, Americans will pick the crops if you cut off the free money for sitting on their duffs Obozo is giving them.
JSBeals posted at 12:03 pm on Tue, Oct 18, 2011.
Rosy, you sound a little silly when say, "JSBeals is still on the delusion that illegals just do the jobs Americans wont do. Very true" If it is true, how is it delusional? It may be that Americans are too lazy to do the field work, etc. which is why illegals are hired, or maybe it is poor wages. I'm not a supporter of La Ratza - while I have heard of it, I'm not exactly sure what it is. In a perfect world, Americans would be doing those jobs at a decent wage - a modest wage that can support a family. But I am afraid the prices on those products would be too high for the consumer. There was a time Mexicans came across the border with little notice, did their work, then went back home to their families Mexico with little notice – that’s when we called them migrant workers – maybe that was before your time. But now because the border is harder cross they stay here indefinitely because it is too dangerous to cross.
One more thing Rosy, raging and rushing to judgment never solves anything. We must have reasonable discussions to get to reasonable solutions. And please stop calling our President inappropriate names. It doesn't make him look bad, it makes you look bad.
sockratties posted at 1:46 pm on Tue, Oct 18, 2011.
JSBeals... You didn't recognize it because Rosy, again, childishly perverted the name of something in an attempt to demean it. La Raza refers to The National Council of La Raza a non-profit and non-partisan advocacy group. NCLR receives funding from philanthropic organizations, such as the Ford Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, as well as corporations such as Citigroup and Wal-Mart. La Raza is pro-Hispanic and againstt bigotry and prejudice. They do not advocate illegal immigration nor do they spurn the rule of law. Their focus is on improving opportunities for U.S. Citizens of Hispanic heritage in America.
samkat posted at 6:54 pm on Tue, Oct 18, 2011.
Sock: You are either misinformed or possibly a member of La Raza. They also get federal funding and as for being no partisan, their actions disprove that statement. They may not advocate illegal immigration (that point may subject to debate) but they certainly go to great lengths to protect them and set up roadblocks to prevent their removal.
Rosy: You are on target so stand tall.
For those of you who claim that Americans will not do the work and crops are rotting in the fields, take the time to read the Alabama papers. The state has actually established a program to connect willing workers with farmers. One picture showed an American of African heritage working along side an American of Anglo heritage picking tomatoes. Folks tend to forget that before the illegal invasion, the crops were picked by migrant Americans.
We will always have poorly educated Americans and with the proper incentives (no welfare and no food stamps) there will be in incentive to work,
In_God_We_Trust posted at 1:26 pm on Wed, Oct 19, 2011.
sockratties, La Raza means "The Race", and you call that a non-partisan advocacy group? If white people named a white advocacy group as "The Race" what would you call it? Does the word racist ring any bells? La Ratza is a much more fitting word for a racist, Mexican, illegal alien support group. It is synonymous with reconquesta. It stands for increased immigration from Mexico, both legal and illegal, in a time when so many Americans are out of work. These so called farm laborers quickly move on to better paying jobs competing directly with American born citizens. Farm labor immigration is merely a portal for the invasion to continue.
JSBeals you are delusional. It is a fact that paying farm laborers decent wages wouldn't amount to more than a few pennies more for the produce we buy. Are you for the continued exploitation of slave labor from illegal aliens?