Al Gore called..."It's Time for An 'American Spring'"...

by Republican Security Council on Saturday, August 6, 2011 at 8:10am

The Standard & Poor’s (S&P) downgrade of America’s prized AAA credit rating is a defining moment in U.S. economic history. This has never happened before and the nation was able to keep its AAA rating even during the Great Depression. Moody’s and Fitch could now follow S&P in downgrading America. In the same 24 hours our nation achieved the highest food stamp level (45.8 million), and the lowest credit rating in history.If the downgrade is not reversed it will mean another $1 trillion in additional interest charges for the next decade. The downgrade will last for at least 6 to 24 months, and there is a real possibility of additional downgrades. Five governments have regained their AAA ratings but it took them between 9 and 18 years. This downgrade was easy to avoid, and it is wrong to blame both political parties. The responsibility for this massive failure belongs to the Democrats. The Obama administration added $4 trillion to the debt in two years. This included the initial $940 billion price tag of ObamaCare and the $862 billion stimulus. The result is the biggest tax and spend government in American history. At no point during the next decade will the budget be in balance. In February the President submitted a $3.7 trillion budget plan with a $1.5 trillion deficit. The budget had no deficit reduction, and was so fiscally irresponsible it was rejected in the Senate by a 97-0 vote.Over 90% of the experience of Obama cabinet members is from the public sector, which is a sharp contrast with the past. Perhaps this explains why they advocated the huge stimulus plan focusing on hand outs to government agencies.Virtually nothing went to spur growth, investment and employment in the private economy. The stimulus could have resulted in the creation of millions of new jobs, but the GOP and the private sector were not consulted. President Obama is now saying: "I don't think there's a sense I've been successful." We agree with the response of former Sen. Fred Thompson (R-TN): "That's true, and I believe that sense is called 'common'". The President has repeatedly tried to shift the agenda, but as James Carville once noted, "It's the economy, stupid!" REPUBLICANS HAVE BEEN RESPONSIBLE S&P wanted $4 trillion in cuts, not the $2.5 trillion that was just approved. Republicans always advocated big cuts, but the major proposal from Democrats has been job destroying tax cuts. Their other recommendation was a veteran Democratic Party solution, take money away from Social Security, and kick the can down the road. One of the first things the House GOP did when it regained power in January was to repeal ObamaCare. They also passed $6.2 trillion in cuts as part of the Ryan plan, as well as a balanced budget amendment. The GOP even passed a budget, which has not been seen on Capitol Hill in a long time. During the negotiations with Vice President Biden, the GOP offered to enact all of the non-defense cuts which had been recommended by Obama's deficit commission. STORM WARNINGS House Speaker John Boehner wanted a $6.2 trillion cut but was willing to compromise on an initial $4 trillion cut with no tax hake. In seeking this deal in May he said "if we don't act boldly now, the markets will act for us very soon." Boehner wanted to move quickly because the storm warnings were so apparent. Unfortunately President Obama would not agree to the $4 trillion reduction. Six months ago S&P warned the United States there was a 50% chance of a downgrade. S&P officials said the recommendations of Obama's deficit commission were a step in the right direction. Unfortunately the President rejected all of them. In its statement yesterday, S&P criticized the recent debt ceiling agreement which contained “only minor policy changes on Medicare and little change in other entitlements, the containment of which we and most other independent observers regard as key to long-term fiscal sustainability.” For three decades Democrats have refused all attempts to revise entitlements. The People's Republic of China (PRC) has a Communist government but for the past year even they have been giving the Obama administration lectures in fiscal responsibility. The PRC is America's largest creditor, and holds $1.2 trillion of US debt. In an official statement, China said the United States must "live within its means. The US government has to come to terms with the painful fact that the good old days when it could just borrow its way out of messes of its own making are finally gone."The International Monetary Fund also warned the United States. The IMF report outlined the explosion of spending by the Obama administration, and said America's national debt would soon reach 100% of GDP.The IMF report raised excellent questions regarding the costs of ObamaCare. The IMF was highly skeptical of Obama administration claims that health care reform would reduce the deficit. The IMF warned of dire fiscal problems for America. The U.S. will have to reduce its structural deficit by a staggering 12% of GDP. The crisis which is now occurring in Greece only involves a 9% reduction. According to the IMF, America is the number two nation in need of major deficit reduction, while Japan has the top stop. WHAT DID DEMOCRATS DO? America had to cope with a Democratic Congress for four years, and Democrats still have control of the Senate and White House. Despite huge majorities in both houses, they failed to pass a budget nor were they able to enact any of the 12 appropriations bills. This was the first time since passage of the 1974 Budget Act that this occurred. When Democrats took power in January of 2007, they spoke of fiscal responsibility. They deserve credit for passing Pay-Go (pay as you go legislation), and then they failed to adhere to it even once. It was waived every single time. Pay-Go was the top legislative objective of the moderate Blue Dogs, and they appeared to be genuinely stunned when it was ignored. Now 28 of them are no longer in Congress, the Blue Dogs have been cut in half and their Democratic Leadership Council is out of business. The failure to pass a budget or an appropriations bill happened even though Democrats had a super majority which gave them complete control of everything. They had a 77-seat majority in the House, and in the 110th Congress they had a 60 to 40 margin in the Senate. For the last 831 days, the Senate Democratic plan has to been to hide the budget from voters. The only thing they will agree to is another continuing resolution. They will not agree to a budget because it would confirm the exploding costs of ObamaCare. During the Pelosi era, the GOP was presented with legislation such as the $1.2 trillion omnibus spending bill. It was never debated, released late at night and a surprise vote was schedule early the next day. The omnibus was 18 inches high, and this was from the Democratic Congress that promised us full transparency. DON’T BLAME BUSH Liberals are now trying to blame the AAA Downgrade on spending related to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the prescription drug benefit and Hurricane Katrina. They did cost a lot of money, but they did not cause the annual deficits which resulted in the downgrade. The deficit was only $161 billion when Democrats took power in January of 2007. The Congressional Budget Office's projections from January of 2008, the last ones made before it recognized the housing bubble and the implications of its collapse, showed a deficit of just $198 billion for 2009. The Bush deficits were relatively modest until the housing collapse and the global recession of 2008. During his final two years, Bush also was confronted with a Democratic Congress. Bush didn't always succeed but he worked diligently on efforts such as reforming entitlement programs and trying to regulate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. It would have been far better for the nation if Bush's reforms had been enacted. During the last campaign critics said Bush’s TARP program would lose $700 billion. Now it has made a profit. Taxpayers will not lose anything, and we avoided another great depression. Bush came to office in a recession and left with a recession, but the Bush tax cuts rescued the economy and provided the nation with low unemployment, low inflation, and continued growth for 5½ straight years. The Dow Jones reached an all time high, and the tax cuts got America out of the dot com recession. According to the CBO, the Bush tax cuts increased revenue brought into the federal government by 37% over projections from the time they were enacted in 2003 to 2006. In 2007, the CBO stated tax receipts were 11% over projected revenue. Bush's average spending-to-GDP (19.6%) compares to Bill Clinton (19.8%), George H.W. Bush (21.9%), and Reagan (22.4%). It also shows that his deficit-to-GDP was 2%—half that of Bush 41 and Reagan. Deficits under Bush, as a percentage of GDP, were lower than the average over the past 30 years. Why weren't even more jobs created on Bush's watch? Because unemployment was at 4.5% for the majority of his administration. Economists consider a 5% rate full employment. It was a rate that had not been seen since the 1950's. CONCLUSION Most Americans recognize the initials AAA as a place to call when their car breaks down. AA is known as a place to treat an addiction. Perhaps the S&P downgrade will have some beneficial impact. It might finally force liberal Democratic lawmakers into economic rehab. Perhaps some of them will realize deficit reduction cannot wait, American can no longer kick the can down the road, and it is time to be serious about entitlement reform.

By: Republican Security Council

Is Obama Trying to Collapse the Economy?

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/08/cloward-piven_paradise_now.html#ixzz1UTucpfGN

By Jeannie DeAngelis, American Thinker

Combine class warfare, demonizing the rich, getting as many people onto the welfare rolls as possible, and pushing the economic system to collapse and you have a flawless formula for Cloward-Piven 2.0 -- and a vehicle that ensures Obama remains in power.

Cloward-Piven is a much talked-about strategy proposed in the mid-1960's by two Columbia University sociology professors named Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. The Cloward-Piven approach was sometimes referred to as the "crisis strategy," which they believed were a means to "end poverty."

The premise of the Cloward-Piven collective/anti-capitalist gospel decried "individual mobility and achievement," celebrated organized labor, fostered the principle that "if each finally found himself in the same relative economic relationship to his fellows ... all were infinitely better off."

The duo taught that if you flooded the welfare rolls and bankrupted the cities and ultimately the nation, it would foster economic collapse, which would lead to political turmoil so severe that socialism would be accepted as a fix to an out-of-control set of circumstances.

The idea was that if people were starving and the only way to eat was to accept government cheese, rather than starve, the masses would agree to what they would otherwise reject. In essence, for the socialist-minded, the Cloward-Piven strategy is a simple formula that makes perfect sense; the radical husband-and-wife team had Saul Alinsky as their muse, and they went on to teach his social action principles to a cadre of socialist-leaning community organizers, one of whom was Barack Obama.

As the debt crisis continues to worsen, President Obama stands idly by an inferno with his arms crossed, shaking his head, and doing nothing other than kinking the fire hose and closing the spigot. Spectator Obama is complaining that the structure of the American economy is engulfed in flames while accusing the Congress, which is trying desperately to douse the fire, of doing nothing about the problem.

Although speculative, if the Cloward-Piven strategy is the basis of the left's game plan, spearheaded by Alinsky devotee Barack Obama, it certainly explains the President's inaction and detached attitude.

The greatest nation in the history of the world is teetering on the brink of a catastrophic economic crisis. America was pushed to this point by a rapidly-expanding national debt and a stressed-out entitlement system; in the center of this crisis is the President, who insists on expanding it even further, all in the name "fairness" and "social justice."

As a default date nears and the President threatens seniors that there's a chance they may not receive their Social Security checks, it has been revealed that the federal government disperses a stunning 80 million checks a month, which means that about a third of the US adult population could be receiving some sort of entitlement.

Since the 1960's when Cloward-Piven presented a socialistic guideline to usher in the type of evenhandedness Obama lauds, America's entitlement rolls have swelled from eight million to 80 million. If the nation's ability to disperse handouts were ever disrupted, it's not hard to see how chaos would erupt should an angry army of millions demand what Cloward-Piven called "the right to income."

Couple the threat of dried-up funds for food stamps, Social Security, unemployment benefits and the like with the Obama administration's vigorous campaign to turn a tiny upper class of big earners into the enemy, and you have the Cloward-Piven recipe for anarchy and complete collapse.

If the worst happened, Saul Alinsky's biggest fan, whose poll numbers continue to plummet, could use mayhem in the streets to remain firmly ensconced in the White House. Alinsky taught his students a basic principle that community organizer Barack Obama learned well: "Never let a good crisis go to waste." Fiscal disintegration coupled with lawlessness would deliver the type of Cloward-Piven/Saul Alinsky trifecta that progressives have worked toward and waited decades for.

Barack Obama has spent the last 1,000+ days defying reason and choosing policy directions that seem nonsensical to the rational mind: a failed stimulus package; ObamaCare; growing the deficit to astronomical proportions; and cynically portraying wealth as immoral. Now, when cuts are the only fix to a budgetary balloon about to burst, a seemingly illogical President digs in and demands additional phantom dollars to spend on a system that is collapsing under the weight of unmanageable debt.

It's hard to figure out the method to the President's obvious madness, because based on Obama's approval rating, if the election were held today even Pee Wee Herman could replace Obama behind the Resolute Desk. Maybe the "method" isn't "mad" in the least!

Could it be that Barack Obama is purposely pressuring the system in a premeditated effort to foster a major crisis? One that would demand extraordinary measures to control by a President who could then mete out basic sustenance to Americans who would agree to anything to regain some sense of normalcy. And in the process successfully usher in the "socially just" system Barack Obama has dreamed of all his life.

While radical Alinsky/Cloward-Piven disciple Obama appears to be clueless and detached, it may be a ploy; he may actually be focused and engaged as he purposely pursues an Alinsky-inspired course of action to force the system to "live up" to its own rules. Obama's ultimate goal of once-and-for-all discrediting the capitalist system and replacing America's foundational economic and social tenets with a broad-based socialist one headed by progressive Marxists like himself, is actually within reach.

As Obama pushes and prods the US economy and instigates social unrest, it could be that he believes a Cloward-Piven-style utopia resides just beyond the horizon -- a progressive panacea where an election-free, classless society, thankful for a simple crust of bread, looks to Barack Obama to keep the peace by remaining in power indefinitely.

Therefore, unless all of America, regardless of class or political persuasion, pays attention to the potential for a bleak future that lies ahead and realizes the President's non-plan could be itself an actual calculated plan, the resulting consequences will affect everyone, as Barack Obama transforms a once great nation into Cloward and Piven's idea of paradise.

Author's content: www.jeannie-ology.com

If he tried this at home he might be taken out.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/08/cloward-piven_paradise_now.html#ixzz1UTumsPP1