Libs played the Warren Buffet card every time they tried to defend Obama’s economic intentions during the campaign. Yet like I kept telling them: the man’s an entrepreneur, not an economist. The two are totally different.

Sharke on July 9, 2009 at 11:52 PM

From David Horowitz’s “Discover the Networks” page:

Wiley’s first act was to organize nationwide protests by welfare recipients. From June 20-30, 1966, about forty welfare recipients marched 155 miles from Cleveland to Columbus, Ohio, gathering at the state capitol with about 2,000 supporters to demand increased benefits. Their June 30 arrival in Columbus was timed to coincide with rallies in fifteen other cities, including New York, Trenton, Chicago, Louisville, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Wiley declared “the birth of a movement.” It became known as the Welfare Rights Movement.

Wiley’s National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) held its founding convention in Washington DC, August 25-27, 1967. Closely following Cloward and Piven’s recommendations, Wiley and his followers invaded welfare offices — often violently — bullying social workers and loudly demanding every penny to which the law “entitled” them. Regarding Wiley’s tactics, The New York Times reported in 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.”

In accordance with the Cloward-Piven strategy, NWRO pushed for a guaranteed living income, which it defined, in 1968, as $5,500 per year for every American family with four children. Wiley introduced the battle cry, “Fifty-five hundred or fight!,” raising it the following year to “Sixty-five hundred or fight!” Though the guaranteed income never progressed beyond the level of rhetoric, the tens of billions of dollars in welfare entitlements that Wiley and his followers managed to squeeze from state and local governments came very close to sinking the U.S. economy, just as Cloward and Piven had predicted.

Wiley and his welfare radicals terrorized social workers all over the United States, but their greatest success came in New York City. Newly elected in 1966, arch-liberal Mayor John Lindsay knuckled under to every demand from Wiley’s NWRO. New York’s welfare rolls had already been growing by 12 percent per year before Lindsay took office. The growth rate jumped to 50 percent annually in 1966. “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,” writes Sol Stern in the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal. As a direct result of its reckless welfare spending, New York City was forced to declare bankruptcy in 1975.

Sharke on July 9, 2009 at 11:59 PM