The REAL War on the Poor

Many of my Democratic friends tell me that they are Democrats "because they care." This is both amusing and frustrating for its simplistic attitude. Do they think that conservatives don't care about the poor? But the other thing about them is how they view the solution to the problem of poverty. While most of them provide direct cash assistance to many worthwhile programs, and some even contribute personal time and effort, the same can be said for my conservative friends. Democrats as a whole see the best solution to all problems as using the government to remedy poverty.
Never mind that in the almost forty-five years since Lyndon Johnson's Great Society program, we haven't budged the percentage of people who are considered to be poor. Of course the problems of poverty when the Great Society program was enacted are completely different than they are now. Then, the problem was the lack of electricity and running water in the poorest regions of the country. Now, it's people who have color TVs, XBox or other such time wasting devices. Then, the poor actually suffered from malnutrition and faced starvation. Now, the biggest problem related to food for the poor is the level of obesity.
It may be that the greatest problem for the poor though, are the ones who claim to help them. And I am sure that it will be interesting to Mark T. that the problems stem from corporations. Just not the usual corporations that he rails against. In fact these corporations are working to destroy the poor.
I realize that this is a serious charge, and I come to it regrettably. It started with the allegations of voter fraud last year, and hit the high (or is it low) point with the videos of ACORN representatives giving advice on how to avoid taxes on a child sex slavery operation. The founder of ACORN, Wade Rathke is where I started. That connection led me to George Wiley and his National Welfare Reform Organization, which employed the Cloward-Piven Stategy.
From the article:

First proposed in 1966 and named after Columbia University sociologists Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, the "Cloward-Piven Strategy" 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. . . .

In their 1966 article, Cloward and Piven charged that the ruling classes used welfare to weaken the poor; that by providing a social safety net, the rich doused the fires of rebellion. 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, wrote Cloward and Piven, 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. . . .

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."

Rathke implemented the Cloward-Piven model and then franchised it. Selling licenses to other community organizers, he extracts franchise fees and dues from the members to the tune of arougn $64 million each year. This is separate from any charitable donations or tax payer monies. But Rathke is expanding the model from just breaking the system through welfare reform. He is also trying to drive businesses into bankruptcy through the use of so called "living wage" laws that artificially inflate the rate of compensation. In the 1990s, Rathke led the charge for subprime lending and then sued the banks for predatory lending practices, a sort of win-win for him and lose-lose for everyone else. Currently, Rathke's many organizations which spun off from ACORN are engaged in promoting ObamaCare as well.
Looking at the big picture, ACORN is a corrupt organization which claims to represent the poor, but is only interested in destroying the American economic system, the poor be damned. The cynicism that would take the weakest members of our society and use them as cannon fodder in Wade Rathke's desire to destroy this country is appalling.
Now, I am not saying that those who support the causes that Rathke is championing are necessarily part of a nefarious plot. Instead, it is the cynicism of Rathke that he would use people's good intentions to destroy the very ones that they want to help.
God Save Us All.