Incompetent? Evil? Both?

PJM's Zombie looks at whether Obama is a Keynesian or of the Cloward-Piven school.

Raising the issue of whether he is trying to save the economy (albeit via the idea of more spending and debt to give a short term "stimulus") or trying to hurt the economy (by maxing out number of people on various forms of goverment support) in order to give a crisis to enact his "reforms".

The answer? Not good.

That’s because there is a bit of Cloward-Piven inherent in Keynesian theory itself. When Nancy Pelosi in all seriousness announces (as she did) that indefinitely extended unemployment benefits are a great way to stimulate the economy, then we’ve seemingly crossed the frontier into Cloud-Cuckoo-Land. Or have we? The original goal of Cloward-Piven, after all, was to bring about a “guaranteed annual income” for all Americans, and wouldn’t the arrival of permanent unemployment benefits for everyone essentially bring us to the same station, albeit by a different track?

So less of an or and more of a both. Joy.


And then there's this little gem.

To discourage any sparks of self-reliance or proud independence amongst the poor, the left invented a profession called “community organizer,” whose very purpose is get the underclass addicted to government handouts — an essential component needed for the Cloward-Piven Strategy to work. What did you think “community organizers” do when they organize communities? Ever seen ACORN at work? “Community organizing” groups such as ACORN are in fact the physical embodiment of the Cloward-Piven Strategy. They exist to encourage as many people as possible to sign up for all the benefits, welfare programs and handouts for which they could conceivably be eligible (and, as various investigations have revealed, many benefits
for which they aren’t).

Is it therefore any surprise that Barack Obama described himself as a community organizer and once worked with ACORN? With that sort of track record — not to mention that he also went to school at Columbia, where both Cloward and Piven taught and where their strategy was born,
and that he himself said he hung out with “Marxist professors” in college — there’s no question that Obama must be intimately familiar with the Cloward-Piven Strategy and the principles behind it.

Read it all.

Meh, here have a sleepy corgi.