“I know firsthand about welfare and welfare dependency because of my own life, living seven years in and out,” says Star Parker, founder and president of the Center for Urban Renewal and Education (CURE).

Parker, also a syndicated columnist, explains what she thinks are the actual steps out of poverty and why our government should have no role in welfare in America.

Started as part of the Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society in the 1960s, the War on Poverty has been anything but effective, according to Parker. “This whole notion that we should even have a ‘war on poverty’ dismisses the fact that individuals have a role in their own lives,” she says.

(more…)

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Download Podcast | iTunes | Podcast Feed

On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson is joined by Francis Cianfrocca and Pejman Yousefzadeh to discuss Paul Ryan’s budget proposal, plus Francis explains why the Fed loaned billions to foreign banks.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

Related Links:

GOP Aim: Cut $4 Trillion
The GOP Path to Prosperity
Paul Ryan is Not Jesus, But His Path To Prosperity Gospel is Really Good
US Debt Clock
Foreign Banks Tapped Fed’s Secret Lifeline Most at Crisis Peak

Follow Brad on Twitter
Follow Francis on Twitter
Follow Pej on Twitter

For a guy known to hold some pretty strange views, this might be the most bizarre perspective on welfare policy I have ever seen. Here is Jerry Brown from his Pacifica Radio show in 1995 (full transcript here):

The conventional viewpoint says we need a jobs program and we need to cut welfare. Just the opposite! We need more welfare and fewer jobs. Jobs for every American is doomed to failure because of modern automation and production. We ought to recognize it and create an income-maintenance system so every single American has the dignity and the wherewithal for shelter, basic food, and medical care. I’m talking about welfare for all. Without it, you’re going to have warfare for all. Without a universal health care like every other civilized country, without a minimum level of income, this country will explode. You can’t blame the guy at the bottom forever. At some point there’s a reaction and we’ll see that the real criminals are those calling the tune, making the rules, and walking to the bank. We have the money, we have the brain power. The United States now has the highest measured wealth of any nation ever in the history of the world. We could rebuild our cities, we could create the kind of buying power and community well-being that will provide for peace. The guaranteed income is one way. Another way is to have always the availability of work in a nonprofit, in community service. A third is to start giving people training to develop skills where they can be self-supporting. You could come up with a cash supplement. Even conservatives have suggested a negative income tax to cut out the bureaucracy. If we were smart, we’d get rid of welfare and give people a family assistance like they do in Europe…

The problem isn’t even a problem. Automation and technology would be a great boon if it were creative, if there were more leisure, more opportunity to engage in raising a family, providing guidance to the young, all the stuff we say we need. America will work if we’re all in it together. It’ll work when there’s a shared sense of destiny. It can be done! It’s all there! What isn’t there is the leadership to create the kind of social network, the safety net, the distribution that would truly create a just and equal society…

We have to restore power to the family, to the neighborhood, and the community with a non-market principle, a principle of equality, of charity, of let’s-take-care-of-one-another. That’s the creative challenge. First, expose relentlessly the big lie that comes over the tube every night-that if you just go out and find that job, and work harder, it’ll all be fine. It won’t! There’s not enough work to go around and a lot of the pay is not fair. Unless you totally yank up that system and create a better one, unless the spirit changes, unless the heart opens, unless we confront power with the truth of our own unarmed but absolute fearless truth, we’re not going to overcome it. Evil is too embedded to be overcome by anything other than a spiritual challenge.

So let me see if I can get this straight. Since full employment is a practical impossibility, we should just give up on the idea of job promotion and hand out a minimum income or dole like they do in Europe. This has clearly worked out so well for them.

(more…)

The retirement of Evan Bayh is the latest heralding of difficult 2010 election year for the Democrats.  It is also a symptom of Obama’s mid 40s approval rating.  Smart Democrats know that the average midterm election year losses for the President’s party, when his approval rating is below 50%, is 41 seats in the House.  Three Presidents in the modern era suffered such a fate – Johnson, Ford and Bill Clinton.  Of those three, only Clinton went on to win a second term.  While it is likely Obama will suffer huge mid-term losses, it is more than unlikely that he will enjoy Clinton’s revival.

Clinton suffered the loss of 54 House seats in his first midterm election, despite a growing economy, because he broke his middle class tax cut promise – and the Republicans were smart enough to unanimously oppose that and run on the Contract With America.  Despite the loss of the House for the first time in 40 years, Clinton won reelection.

Clinton was able to win reelection in part because Bob Dole was not an effective candidate for the Republicans on the tax issue.  Clinton also famously triangulated in 1995 and 1996 with the help of longtime strategist Dick Morris.  Dropping ideology for practicality, in 1995 and 1996, Clinton pushed a national campaign to prevent teen pregnancy, issued an order clarifying the rights of religious expression in schools,  supported uniforms for public schools, banned human cloning, signed Megan’s law and welfare reform to name a few less than ideological triangulations.  Even before that, Clinton incurred the wrath of unions by pushing the ratification of NAFTA.

Of course, as the Governor of a swing state, Bill Clinton leaned an early lesson in pragmatism after he was defeated in his bid for a second term.  After apologizing for the policies that led to his reelection defeat, he regained the governorship and went on to enact mandatory competency testing for teachers and granted tax breaks to businesses – again with triangulating guru Dick Morris by his side.

(more…)

Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) founder Wade Rathke wants to use the Internet to overthrow the capitalist system.

He said so in his new book, Citizen Wealth: Winning the Campaign to Save Working Families, in which he serves up some community organizing war stories, and offers his thoughts on the future of organizing. Rathke’s currently on a cross-country book tour.

ACORN founder Wade Rathke (to the right of the microphone) at an ACORN-SEIU rally.

Rathke, a pioneer of the so-called welfare rights movement that aims to get Americans on welfare, devotes an entire chapter of his book to what he calls “The ‘Maximum Eligible Participation’ Solution.” It is a strategy for orchestrated crisis that savvy leftist groups across America are likely to embrace. He writes:

“[I]t is hard to believe that we cannot assemble the troops to mount a campaign for maximum eligible participation that harvests the opportunities and dollars already available if we could achieve full utilization of existing programs.”

Rathke acknowledges his support for the Cloward-Piven Strategy, an approach to radical social and political change articulated by Marxist university professors Richard A. Cloward and Frances Fox Piven in a 1966 Nation article, “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty.” The two academics called for “a massive drive to recruit the poor onto the welfare rolls” in an effort to overwhelm the system. [Italics in original.]

The strategy helped to bankrupt New York City in 1975. Years later, the Big Apple’s mayor, Rudy Giuliani, denounced the academic activists by name. “This wasn’t an accident,” Giuliani argued in a 1997 speech. “It wasn’t an atmospheric thing, it wasn’t supernatural. This is the result of policies and programs designed to have the maximum number of people get on welfare.”

(more…)