Debates DNC

Jan 24, 2016 Democratic presidential debate tonight

The latest Rasmussen Reports monthly Hillary Meter finds that 83% of Likely Democratic Voters think Clinton is likely to be their party’s presidential nominee in 2016. That now includes 43% who say it is Very Likely, down from 56% in December and 58% in November. Still, just 14% feel the former secretary of State and first lady is not very or Not At All Likely to win the nomination. This is why the State Department doesn't want to release the rest of Clinton's last batch of emails "The Caucuses"

Capitalism, Socialism, Communism, Explained

Dr. Lawrence Quill, chairman and professor of political science at San Jose State University. Explained the difference between communism, socialism, capitalism and democratic socialism -- in very professorial terms.

Capitalism — or really the concept of "liberalism" — arose in the 17th century, and centers on the right to private property. In Adam Smith's foundational "Wealth of Nations," Quill notes, "is recognition that capitalism is going to make the lives of a good majority of the population miserable, and that there will be a need for government intervention in society and the economy to offset the worse effects."

Socialism was in part a response to capitalism, largely through the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Socialism focuses on the inequalities that arise within capitalism through a number of possible responses. Quill outlined some possibilities: "[T]he state might 'wither away' or collapse altogether, in others it would regulate the production of goods and services, in yet others it would become thoroughly democratic" -- all with the aim of reducing that inequality.

You can see that's where democratic socialism arises. That philosophy, Quill writes, seeks "democratic control of sectors of society and economy in order to avoid the pitfalls of an unregulated market and -- this is most important -- the kind of terrible authoritarian government that emerged in the Soviet Union."


Socialism was in part a response to capitalism, largely through the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Socialism focuses on the inequalities that arise within capitalism through a number of possible responses. Quill outlined some possibilities: "[T]he state might 'wither away' or collapse altogether, in others it would regulate the production of goods and services, in yet others it would become thoroughly democratic" -- all with the aim of reducing that inequality.

You can see that's where democratic socialism arises. That philosophy, Quill writes, seeks "democratic control of sectors of society and economy in order to avoid the pitfalls of an unregulated market and -- this is most important -- the kind of terrible authoritarian government that emerged in the Soviet Union."
What you need to know about socialism

Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has been making waves as the only democratic socialist running for president. Here's what you need to know about being a democratic socialist and how it's different from socialism. (Alice Li/The Washington Post)

Communism "was the endpoint of Marx's ideas," Quill writes, though Marx didn't delineate what it would look like, exactly. "We find hints in works like 'The German Ideology" (1846) where there is a description of working life that is unalienated, i.e. creative and various -- we hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, and become opera critics in the evening." During the Cold War, though, the idea came to be inextricably and pejoratively associated with the Soviet Union and with the elimination of private property. The term, in Quill's words, "served as a shorthand for all things un-American" -- which was the way that Trump used it.

Quill's most important point is that "all of these terms are 'umbrella concepts'; in other words, they are host to a family of related ideas, not all of them compatible with one another." We tend to use the terms concretely, which necessarily introduces inaccuracies. Or, as Quill put it, "they [can] serve as excuses not to think, as belief systems that discourage explorations of the mismatch between theory and practice and the inconsistencies of any grand theory."

So that's the college-level curriculum. Next, I scaled it back a bit and talked to Tori Waite, who teaches high school history at Del Mar High School in San Jose. After all, since most of us were first introduced to these ideas in high school, perhaps we just need a refresher.

"When we teach about the different types of economies," Waite said, "the first thing we do is we talk about economic questions. How is it made? Who makes it? Who gets to buy it? Based on the economy, different people answer those questions."

Simplifying Quill's explanation: "In a communist country, the government answers those questions. There's no private business. There's no private property. The government decides."

"In a capitalist society, the people make those decisions. The businesses, the market decides how much products will cost, how many there are, where it will be made."

"In the socialist system, there's a mix of both. The government operates the system to help all, but there is opportunity for private property and private wealth. That's generally how we talk about it." Back to Quill's point: A socialist government could control all of the means of production -- or it could, for example, use taxes to redistribute resources among the population.

Both Quill and Waite note that the United States is not a purely capitalist society. There are and have long been socialist aspects to how the government makes decisions and applies its power, while still striving to keep the marketplace as free as possible. And, of course, while allowing democratic decisions to guide what it does.

That's the nature of thing, and why college students spend so much time at coffee houses arguing over nonsense.)

Unions, you are fools. Obama's latest plans....

The Obama administration is about to power up a massive new executive action on immigration and it’s far scarier than anyone could have imagined. Last November, when Homeland Security released its ten memos commandeering immigration policy from Congress, Secretary Johnson included a vague plan aimed at benefiting the tech industry, innocuously titled “Modernizing the Employment-Based Immigrant Visa System.” But a secret memo recently leaked on an immigration law blog now reveals that this ‘modernization’ plan will not only fast-track hundreds of thousands of work permits to employment visa-applicants in violation of longstanding U.S. worker protection laws, but will enable hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens to also receive work permits despite their unlawful status. As the full details leak out from the narrow clique of immigration lawyers and lobbyists advising the President, labor advocates are scrambling to warn the public.

Under our current system, most guest workers wishing to remain permanently in the U.S. must arrange for their employer to “sponsor” them by filing an I-140 application, putting them in a queue for a green card. When a temporary (“non-immigrant”) guest worker reaches the front of the immigrant visa queue, they are allowed to submit an application to “adjust” their “status” to that of permanent resident alien. Getting to this stage is key. By regulation an adjustment-of-status applicant automatically receives a coveted work permit or “EAD”. An EAD allows the alien to work anywhere in the country and apply for welfare. It’s the central reason foreigners line up to come here and it’s what Obama’s attempting to distribute to illegal aliens under the DACA and DAPA programs. And for those on guest-worker visas, EADs allow them to stay in the country even when their “temporary” visa (like an H-1b) runs out.

The wait-time between filing an I-140 application and being allowed to file for adjustment-of-status (getting you the golden EAD) is regulated by the State Department and depends not only on one’s filing date, but also on one’s country of origin. But for the millions of aspiring alien workers from overpopulated countries like India, per nation visa quotas have meant a typical wait of 8 to 10 years to get their EADs—Non-skilled workers from any country are also given lengthy wait-times, as there has never been a shortage of poor Americans who need employment. This per-country wait-time is now what Obama’s unilaterally arranging to slash. From now on, filing an adjustment-of-status application won’t be necessary to receive an EAD and any alien who merely has an I-140 petition that’s been approved for a year can obtain the prized work permit.

The new executive action will cut the line of people waiting to get an EAD dramatically, a backlog of hundreds of thousands of people who would otherwise have to wait patiently in line. This action will be a major encouragement to come here by any means possible, with a likely surge of thousands of EAD applications hitting an already backlogged USCIS in the first week alone. For the weak labor market faced by most American workers, it’ll be like a dam bursting.

This is a major coup for the axis of open immigration and Big Tech lobbyists. Big Tech would prefer to hire millions of temporary workers on H-1Bs over American workers because their visas are tied to their employer making them docile and unlikely to unionize. But flooding the labor market with current and future computer technicians, even with workers who’ll have greater flexibility, is much more important—it also gets rid of H-1B renewal and administrative costs.

Perhaps the most striking part of Obama’s move: illegal aliens will also be able to get EADs. All one needs to file an I-140 petition is an official ID; proving lawful presence isn’t required. The thousands of business-owners around the country who knowingly hire illegal aliens can cynically sponsor petitions whether or not the underlying applicant is legal. Ultimately, the USCIS bureaucrats will reject his or her adjustment-of-status application (after 10 plus years), but they’ll still be able to get that golden EAD.

Generally, I-140 petitions require aliens to submit a so-called Labor Certification showing that the petitioning employer has advertised for the position in a newspaper. This is meant to ensure that foreigners are not hired over American workers. As immigration attorneys have admitted, however, they show employers how “to do exactly the opposite”, for instance, by creating deceiving advertisements or disqualifying American interviewees on false pretences.



Filing costs for I-140 visa petitions are not cheap; with attorney costs, they can be several thousand dollars. But petitioning for an illegal alien-employee, with a promise to take the cost off his wages, could create a beneficial indentured servant relationship for employers. Larger employers may also file the petitions en masse if they feel a big crackdown coming (highly unlikely, of course). Furthermore, what’s to stop open-borders advocates, like La Raza, MALDEF, or LatinoJustice (where Justice Sotomayor was a board member) from creating a fund to finance the petition costs on behalf of employers? What about those groups’ billionaire-backers, like George Soros, Paul Singer, or the Ford Foundation?

The legal authority proffered by DHS in the leaked memo is predictably a deliberate misinterpretation of the law. These are the same DHS attorneys of course who, with help from immigration attorneys, produced the 2010 memo “justifying” the DACA executive amnesty program. They claim that two provisions of the Immigration & Naturalization Act, §205 and §274A(h)(3), give DHS Secretary Johnson discretion to issue unlimited numbers of EADs. Note that this is the same argument they’re employing in an attack against Texas’s amnesty injunction. The organization I work for, the Immigration Reform Law Institute, has eviscerated this argument in briefs submitted in support of Texas. Additionally, DHS has claimed the same authority for a separate move that would give work permits to spouses of H-1B-holders. We’re in the process of litigating against that rulemaking, which, if we’re successful, will be utterly disastrous for Obama’s amnesty as well as this new rule change.

Unlike the DACA executive amnesty program being challenged in the courts, USCIS is apparently opting to go through the normal regulatory process (although no details are up yet), complete with an opportunity for the public to submit comments. If enough patriotic American workers and their families flood the comment database, the agency may react like the ATF did when their proposed rule banning “green tipped” bullets was deluged with angry comments forcing them to rescind the proposal. If Americans care about their sovereignty like they do about their guns, Obama’s new immigration re-write won’t see the light of day.

The Cloward–Piven strategy is a political strategy Obama is using to overload our system

My dear friends, isn’t it time we paid the price to know your history, and to teach our history to others? History sets one of the parameters of critical thinking. By controlling the “parameters” our critical thinking skills are limited. Example: The ball is red, period. That is what Common Core wants to do with our children. They do not want our children, or grand children, or you to every say, “who said the ball is red, and who said red is red, and who said that is a ball, and who said the ball is round?” I hope you get the picture!That is an article for another day. Today I would like to talk about the current strategy that is driving today’s overloading of our systems and the philosophy and strategy behind it.

The Cloward–Piven strategy is a political strategy outlined in 1966 by American sociologists and political activists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven that called for overloading the U.S. public welfare system in order to precipitate a crisis that would lead to a replacement of the welfare system with a national system of "a guaranteed annual income and thus an end to poverty".

Cloward and Piven "proposed to create a crisis in the current welfare system – by exploiting the gap between welfare law and practice – that would ultimately bring about its collapse and replace it with a system of guaranteed annual income. They hoped to accomplish this end by informing the poor of their rights to welfare assistance, encouraging them to apply for benefits and, in effect, overloading an already overburdened bureaucracy."

In papers published in 1971 and 1977 Cloward and Piven were both professors at the Columbia University School of Social Work. The strategy was formulated in a May 1966 article in the liberal magazine The Nation entitled "The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty".

The two stated that many Americans who were eligible for welfare were not receiving benefits, and that a welfare enrollment drive would strain local budgets, precipitating a crisis at the state and local levels that would be a wake-up call for the federal government, particularly the Democratic Party. There would also be side consequences of this strategy, according to Cloward and Piven. These would include: easing the plight of the poor in the short-term (through their participation in the welfare system); shoring up support for the national Democratic Party-then splintered by pluralistic interests (through its cultivation of poor and minority constituencies by implementing a national "solution" to poverty); and relieving local governments of the financially and politically onerous burdens of public welfare (through a national "solution" to poverty).

Cloward and Piven's article is focused on forcing the Democratic Party, which in 1966 controlled the presidency and both houses of the United States Congress, to take federal action to help the poor. They stated that full enrollment of those eligible for welfare "would produce bureaucratic disruption in welfare agencies and fiscal disruption in local and state governments" that would: "deepen existing divisions among elements in the big-city Democratic coalition: the remaining white middle class, the working-class ethnic groups and the growing minority poor. To avoid a further weakening of that historic coalition, a national Democratic administration would be constrained to advance a federal solution to poverty that would override local welfare failures, local class and racial conflicts and local revenue dilemmas."

They further wrote:

“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.”

Michael Reisch and Janice Andrews, Cloward and Piven argued that mass unrest in the United States, especially between 1964 and 1969, did lead to a massive expansion of welfare rolls, though not to the guaranteed-income program that they had hoped for.[8] Political scientist Robert Albritton disagreed, writing in 1979 that the data did not support this thesis; he offered an alternative explanation for the rise in welfare caseloads.

In his 2006 book Winning the Race, political commentator John McWhorter attributed the rise in the welfare state after the 1960s to the Cloward–Piven strategy, but wrote about it negatively, stating that the strategy "created generations of black people for whom working for a living is an abstraction".

According to historian Robert E. Weir in 2007: "Although the strategy helped to boost recipient numbers between 1966 and 1975, the revolution its proponents envisioned never transpired. But my friends it is today.

Some commentators have blamed the Cloward–Piven strategy for the near-bankruptcy of New York City in 1975

Conservative commentator Glenn Beck referred to the Cloward-Piven Strategy often on his Fox News television show, Glenn Beck, during its run from 2009 to 2011, reiterating his opinion that it had helped to inspire President Barack Obama's economic policy. On February 18, 2010, for example, Beck said: "You’ve got total destruction of wealth coming ... It’s the final phase of the Cloward-Piven strategy, which is collapse the system."

Richard Kim, writing in 2010 in The Nation (in which the original essay appeared), called such assertions "a reactionary paranoid fantasy ...", but he also pointed out: "The lefts gut reaction upon hearing of it--to laugh it off as a Scooby-Doo comic mystery--does nothing to blunt its appeal or limit its impact." The Nation later stated that Beck blames the "Cloward-Piven Strategy" for "the financial crisis of 2008, health-care reform, Obama's election and massive voter fraud" and has resulted in the posting of much violent and threatening rhetoric by users on Beck's web site, including death threats against Frances Fox Piven. For her part, Piven vigorously continues to defend the original idea, calling its conservative interpretation "lunatic".

“Who said the ball is red, and who said red is red, and who said that is a ball, and who said the ball is round”

Please share this history with whomever will listen. We may just be the last generation of critical thinkers. Ask your children “why” often, very often. Above all do your research...

More From Contributor:

Priscilla Kinchen

11 mins · Misty Mountain, GA ·

AMERICA WE HAVE A PROBLEM!!!!!
Obama is anti-american! His action record speaks for itself:
He is pro muslim
He wants to bring this country to its knees, and he is succeeding.
Look at all he has done during his presidency.
1. Fired all top generals
2. Reduced the military
3. ++ Contrary to advice from experts, he withdrew from Iraq and Afghanistan paving the way for ISIS.
4. Apologized for America
5. Turned against Israel
6. Created Racial problems, not seen since the 60's.
7. *** Releasing all terrorists from gitmo
8. Traded terrorists for a trader
9. Won't call. Terrorism "Islamic Terrorism"
10. Seen more then once not saluting marines entering or exiting Marine One or Air Force One.
11. Blowing up empty buildings or a pick up truck here and there instead of giving ISIS hell, like our military is more then capable of doing.
12. Fires the defense secretaries when they disagree with him.
13. Refuses to close the border, again against expert advice (and the Will of The American People may I add).
14. Obama care, free college, both meant to bankrupt everyone.
15. Instrumental in turning AMERICA against cops..creating a possible chaotic lawless society in America. (so that he can pronounce Marshall Law, and become Dictator in Chief may I add).
16. No representative in Paris this past weekend, because it was geared toward being anti Islamic Terrorism (which he refuses to utter those words -hahahaha!! ).
Now let's examine his past:
1. His pastor and mentor, as he described him is Pastor Jeremiah Wright, as anti-american as they come.
2. His old pal, Bill Ayers , anti-american and home grown terrorist.
3. Key advisor - Al Sharpton
4. Hippie pot smoker.
5. Foreign aid student from Indonesia.
6. Not a qualified American to even become President.
7. Card carrying member of The Brotherhood.
8. Parents were both members of the Communist party.
9. Never held a 'real'job.
10. Doesn't have a valid legal Social Security number.
11. Lied on Mortgage Application papers.
12. His 'Change' platform is bringing downward Change to America and the World.
Source/References:


 Obama’s Cloward-Piven Weapon of Mass Destruction
  
Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis

More about Cloward–Piven strategy

 Immigration Overload: Record 42.1 Million (Im)migrants in U.S.

Come One, Come All-Free Stuff

WELL OF COURSE HILLARY WON, Clinton embraced the idea of running for a third Obama term

WELL OF COURSE HILLARY WON
Hillary Clinton certainly won the first Democratic debate. But if she couldn’t have beaten that forlorn bunch she should have suspended her campaign immediately.

On stage were five candidates with a median age of 65, and the only current office holder isn’t even a Democrat, but rather an independent socialist who called for “political revolution” – and was seconded!

Here was Clinton facing an even weaker field than Mitt Romney in 2012 – which is saying something – with the added advantage that her supposed rivals spent as much time praising her as they did offering oblique, usually embarrassed, criticisms.

While Sen. Bernie Sanders’ fans no doubt liked what they heard about redistributing the stuffing out of Wall Street and moving toward a Scandinavian-style system (seriously), his biggest moment of the night came when he absolved Clinton of her current scandal surrounding secret servers, hidden emails and classified information – rendering it dead and buried as a consideration for her primary rivals.

But they may not even be rivals anymore, if they ever were.

The former senators, Lincoln “The Block” Chafee and Jim “Father Time” Webb, were at the wrong debate. Webb was talking about the benefits of coal, gun rights and battlefield valor in Vietnam and Chafee playing up spending controls and tax cuts – they might as well have been speaking Mandarin.

Martin O’Malley tried to confront Clinton, but appeared instead to be running for America’s assistant principal, exuding his disappointment in a condescending tone. Depending on what O’Malley’s campaign costs to run and what he can raise, he can presumably hang in until the Iowa caucuses hoping for the weather to change. But we were not looking at the man who was going to break the Clinton machine.

Unless Vice President Joe Biden gets into the race – which looks less likely after the thumping Clinton delivered to her foes and her recent uptick in the polls – Clinton is getting back on the coronation track.

But how she’s going about it matters.

Clinton’s central talking point of the night was her own gender. Americans want an outsider not an insider? She’s outside the male gender, amirite sisters? Her difference from Obama: XX chromosome, y’all! Why was she late getting back from the potty? Lady stuff, Anderson. You wouldn’t understand…

So that’s not going to cut it.

Like Romney in 2012, she lacks the trust or passion of her party’s base. So like him, she has to shackle herself to unpopular or electorally dangerous stances on issues in a bid to secure a win.

There was plenty of loose talk about topics – gun control, global warming, crime and bank regulations, to name four – that would be fine fodder for general election attack ads and talking points.

And most of all, Clinton embraced the idea of running for a third Obama term. That helps keep Biden on the sidelines, but will be a drag with persuadable voters next year.

If things are coming to a quick conclusion, she still has time to un-flip some of the flops, or at least scale them back. But if Biden burns more time on the clock and Sanders and his army keep the pressure on – and one can expect they will – she will have to wait awhile.

And the longer she has to wait to pivot, the more ungainly it will be.