The War on Poverty — $21 Trillion Later

My article in today's FrontPage magazine:

The War on Poverty — $21 Trillion Later

By Matthew Vadum

Fifty years and trillions of dollars after the “War on Poverty” was launched, Americans aren’t much better off, according to a study published by Republican reformers in Congress.

The War on Poverty has barely made a dent in poverty, said the 205-page report unveiled by the House Budget Committee, which is chaired by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.). The report was created in the hope of starting a discussion in Congress about reforming poor-relief programs.

In 1965, the poverty rate was 17.3 percent. In 2012, it was 15 percent. This means taxpayers blew a staggering $20.7 trillion over the last half century in order to achieve a paltry 2.3 percentage point decrease in poverty.

Those on the Left consider this to be social progress by way of coercive redistribution. Mere results have always been less important to the Left than intentions.

Although a sane person would consider the minuscule reduction in poverty a humiliating defeat, left-wingers have successfully been changing the subject, moving the discussion away from their policy failures for 50 years now.

It began back in the Sixties, when instead of being satisfied with New Deal-era programs like Social Security, left-wingers resolved to move America even farther away from its founding ideals, fundamentally changing the country by erecting a supremely sclerotic behemoth welfare state answerable to no one.

The War on Poverty itself was a part of the massive left-wing social engineering and vote-buying scheme known as the Great Society. This war really should have been called the war on American values. As a result of misguided government policies that grew out of the War on Poverty, out-of-wedlock birthrates have mushroomed, David Horowitz and John Perazzo reported in “Government vs. the People.”

Despite an orgy of federal spending, blacks and other minorities have suffered the most from big government poverty alleviation efforts. The anti-marriage, anti-family tilt of welfare policies has devastated black communities.

In his first State of the Union address on Jan. 8, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson ushered in a half-century of government-incentivized sloth, indolence, dependency, and social decay. He exhorted Congress to launch a new belligerency against a perpetually ineradicable foe.

Marxist Radicals Mug Paul Ryan

My article from the August 15, 2012, issue of Front Page Magazine:

Marxist Radicals Mug Paul Ryan

By Matthew Vadum

The same Marxist agitators who tried to silence Mitt Romney in the Hawkeye State a year ago tried to shut down his new running mate Monday.

Two days after the presumptive GOP presidential nominee named Congressman Paul Ryan (R-WI) as his vice presidential pick, Ryan was aggressively heckled by the agrarian socialists and union goons of the ACORN-like Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement (Iowa CCI) throughout a stump speech at the Iowa State Fair.

At last year’s Iowa State Fair members of Iowa CCI badgered and berated Romney, shrieking and interrupting him as he attempted to share his views on reforming entitlement programs like Social Security. They baited Romney into making his arguably impolitic admission that “corporations are people.”

Left-wing activists call this “accountability,” an Orwellian euphemism. Accountability, as the term is used by leftists, is not about transparency or good government. Perhaps partly inspired by the father of the New Left, Herbert Marcuse, who was in favor of silencing non-leftists, accountability actions focus on harassing and intimidating political enemies, disrupting them and forcing them to waste their campaign resources dealing with activists’ provocations.

After Iowa CCI activists loudly demanded Ryan halt the “war on the poor” they perennially accuse Republicans of waging, these broken records of the Left bragged about the trouble they caused as they “challenge[d] Ryan on vitally important issues to everyday Iowans.”

They claimed victory over the congressman, declaring they shaved 30 percent off his speaking time. “Ryan spoke for only twelve minutes, well under his allotment of twenty.”

Several protesters were removed from the event by police. One Iowa CCI activist even reportedly punched a Romney-Ryan volunteer during the speech. Of course the use of physical violence on opponents is an important tactic for the community organizer, as Rules for Radicals author Saul Alinsky admitted to his protégé Nicholas von Hoffman.

True to form, the left-wing Talking Points Memo website got a key detail of the attempted squelching of Ryan’s speech wrong. TPM’s Igor Bobic fell for Iowa CCI’s spin, referring to the nonprofit as an innocuous-sounding “nonpartisan progressive group.”

Although friendly reporters use the adjectives progressive and liberal to describe Iowa CCI, Marxist or neo-communist are more appropriate descriptors.

Iowa CCI has been praised by Bill Moyers and labeled the “Most Valuable Grassroots Advocacy Group” of 2009 by John Nichols of The Nation magazine. Nichols approves of the group’s “in-your-face activism.”

Iowa CCI’s anti-capitalist, anti-American activism guarantees it generous support from hard-left philanthropies. The group has taken in funding from the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation ($600,000 since 2001), Ford Foundation ($575,000 since 2003), McKnight Foundation ($415,000 since 1999), Annie E. Casey Foundation ($260,000 since 2001), Rockefeller Family Fund Inc. ($225,000 since 2000), Needmor Fund ($140,000 since 1999), the George Soros-funded Tides Foundation ($40,000 since 2000), Ben & Jerry’s Foundation ($30,000 since 2007), and Threshold Foundation ($25,000 since 2008).

Iowa CCI has also received grants from the Unitarian Universalist Church’s Veatch Foundation. Grants from that charity were used to found the Minneapolis-based Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP) in 1986. Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie, the ACORN-loving former community organizer, was previously president of the IATP. Ritchie orchestrated Al Franken’s theft of incumbent Republican Norm Coleman’s U.S. Senate seat in the 2008 election cycle.

Iowa CCI is part of a larger Alinsky-inspired organizing network called National People’s Action (NPA). NPA makes no bones about its desire to overthrow what remains of America’s free enterprise system.

As I report in my book, Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers, NPA executive director George Goehl says radicals shouldn’t let the financial crisis go to waste.

“The banking crisis is the next big thing,” Goehl said in 2010 at the left-wing Campaign for America’s Future conference. “The banking crisis is the way to build a big economic justice movement in this country,” Goehl said.

“This is a once in a lifetime opportunity as progressives to engage millions of Americans in a big conversation around serious economic restructuring, not around eking out some victories around the margins, not about making life a little less worse for people, but about big time transformative change.”

If you build a platform for revolution, the angry masses will do the rest, Goehl said.

“If we create a space for people to come out they want to come out,” he said. “People are ready to move to the streets, some because they’re angry, some because they want justice right now, and some because they’re tired of hearing about the Tea Party coming out.”

Like ACORN, Iowa CCI blackmails lenders using the financial affirmative action law known as the Community Reinvestment Act. The organization brags about being the first group to use the law to “negotiate family farm loan agreements with banks.”

NPA worked with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation, and ACORN’s new front groups across America in an economic terrorism campaign aimed at the financial services sector.

You might remember the joint actions conducted by NPA and SEIU. The two organizations have used angry mobs to invade banks and terrorize bank executives, such as Bank of America’s Greg Baer, in their homes.

That’s what the modern American version of the storm trooper, the community organizer, does.

And that’s what the community organizers of Iowa CCI will continue to do.