Now that we’ve established that there really were WMD in Iraq, it’s time for the next story:
This is the famous strategy created by Francis Fox Piven and Richard Cloward back in the 60s when they tried to flood the welfare system with so many applicants that it would break down. And their notion was that the federal government would then come in with a guaranteed annual income. And some people have suggested that ACORN had a conscious plan like this to provoke the financial crisis. I don’t think it was that concrete. I think that’s going too far. But in a broader sense, I do think that the Cloward-Piven style strategy had been regularized, so to speak, amongst community organizers. And they came to think that any kind of excessive financial demands on the system, even without a very specific plan, would at some point inevitably provoke financial difficulties and crises which could be exploited for socialist ends. And this was, as I show in detail, this was common currency among community organizers.
There are those that say that librul black people deliberately provoked the financially crisis, but moderate, principled conservatives like me say that it the destruction they wreaked was inadvertent. Now where the fuck is my Snooze Hour gig?
Guster
Well, that does explain why I’m living in this soshulist utopia.
Tom Levenson
Well, it worked so well in the 60s, why shouldn’t us not-real-American types keep going to that well?
Martin
Did you ever get the feeling you were among a mere handful of people not suffering from neurosyphilis?
Citizen_X
Great. Now the Glibertarians (or is it the Teahadis? I get them mixed up these days) have their own LIHOP and MIHOP idiocy.
kdaug
I’m working on a sewing pattern to convert tote bags into garrotes.
I’ll post it when I’m finished.
beltane
Is that snark? IS THAT SNARK? That could have come straight out of the court briefs of one of the mentally ill pro se litigants I used to have to deal with.
Bella Q
Well, at least McCance is going to resign. And in other wingnut news, Jean Schmidt talked about abortion to a school assembly in Cincinnati and the principal had to send a letter home as it was a 1st – 8th grade group. He asked that they keep it within the school community, but they didn’t! Perhaps it will get some traction for her opponent. And maybe people will be offended that Boehner is campaigning with Rich Iott.
Ash Can
And these guys accuse us of doing too many drugs.
beltane
@Ash Can: No kidding. I was almost waiting for the person who wrote that to offer to show us his head x-rays as proof of the ACORN conspiracy to install transistors in his brain. Do we still have a state hospital system in this country?
Suffern ACE
Yep. They’re angry at the Ivy educated new elites that worked in the banking industry, treasury and the Fed, and the economists and media who cheered on their successes all the way. They really are. Those are the people they resent for looking down on them and ruining everything they hold dear.
kommrade reproductive vigor
Look! The insidious plot has taken hold in the Hoosier State!
MeDrewNotYou
I used to think conspiracy theories were harmless and often funny. Stanly Kubrick directing the moon landing on a sound stage in Nevada? Fluorinated water being a Communist plot? Nowadays, though, I hear these absolutely bizarre ideas and see that they’re respected, if not an outright majority view.
Maybe the fluoride people were in a sense right after all. Our country has been getting dumber and dumber for a while now. Gotta’ be something in the water.
Ash Can
@beltane: That makes me think of the old sports-injury wisecrack, “They x-rayed his head and found nothing.”
@Bella Q:
Oh, thank goodness. That guy shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near kids.
And neither should she.
kommrade reproductive vigor
@Bella Q: Thanks for sharing the good news about McCance. I’m sure we’ll soon hear that he’s just another victim of the homosexual agenda.
Bwahah haa!
Catholics trying to keep a minimize the spread of information about adults who engage in inappropriate behaviour with little kids?
INCONCEIVABLE!
Jack Bauer
I remember in my office, when the BS hit, that the financial crisis was caused by “poor blacks on liar loans and ACORN”. Watching it spread, seeing who bit on it, who repeated/forwarded it, was a truly depressing experience.
These guys didn’t know about Cloward/Piven and socialist plots, they were mostly blue/white collar (with blue collar roots), and they just bought it hook, line and sinker.
It was about this time I outed myself as a bit of a lefty… why it’s best for everyone that the lower and middle income groups band together and fight for a better life, and how we are all being FUCKED DAILY by health insurance, gas prices, our bullshit pay-raises and the constant nickel and diming that we all put up with from every corporate interaction we have, income distribution etc etc, the lot. I couldn’t stand it, the deep racism of it… I might have convinced a couple of ’em… I called out one birther on the insanity of the security services letting a foreigner become POTUS…
I guess it’s redundant to say, that the biggest card played over here to keep the workers divided is the racial one. But my experience with it was an education.
KG
I use to have some meager amount of respect for Hewitt a few years ago. I met him a few times when I was in law school (didn’t take his con law class, but it was a very small campus). But I’ve always known he was a party hack, the type of guy that would say whatever would help the party that minute… he hated McCain until McCain won the nomination, then it was all about President McCain. But this kind of stuff just makes me sad, I know he’s not this dumb.
Uloborus
@MeDrewNotYou:
Wait until the election. We won’t know if they’ve mainstreamed it until then. The right wing echo chamber IS an echo chamber because they spew insanity back and forth at each other and there’s no one to point out they’ve gone off the deep end.
NonyNony
@MeDrewNotYou:
I cry foul – assumes facts not in evidence.
My read of American history is that we’ve been a dumb-ass country pretty much since the founding. We go through these cycles where the dumb-asses are alternatingly in power and marginalized, but its always been there. The idea that there was some kind of “Golden Age” where there were no dumbasses is wrong.
We haven’t even gotten close to the dumbassery that existed in the run up to the Civil War. Hell I’m not sure we’ve quite reached the level of dumbassery that existed in the Gilded Age.
General Stuck
One small example how the wingnuts have systematically, by design, shifted the so called Overton Window rightward and created an army of urban myths. Their punditry functions like a single cell organism, with many components that work in tandem to create their odious memes. The big memes/myths that take decades to build and instill in the national consciousness and body politic. That are almost impossible to change.
You have to give them credit for remaining electorally viable to the degree they have, especially after totally fucking up the country when they finally did get power, and now are on the precipice of getting some of that back. I no longer take for granted anything in politics in this country, because the wingnut will find a way to survive and prosper in our political system.
The wingnuts are almost a perfect political species when it comes to getting themselves elected here, a perfect species and monster like in Alien(s). They can survive almost anything, and have no remorse to try any tactic to prevail, and the discipline to usually get away with it. Their only unfuckupable helpful trait, besides lots of money, is that they are mostly white in a mostly white country, from there they take it in any direction to what ever degree needed to win, though not always successful, especially AFTER TOTALLY FUCKING UP THE COUNTRY. It doesn’t take long to reprogram the wurlitzer and soldier on like nothing ever happened. Accomplished Political Predators, and we take them lightly at our own peril.
MeDrewNotYou
@Uloborus: True, but I’m always discouraged by the MSM doing a ‘he said, she said’ and not pointing out obvious BS. If/when everyone is talking about similar stuff Nov 3*, it will be in the frame of, “Obama believes in gravity, some disagree.” Outrageous beliefs end up not getting you laughed out of the room.
*- IMO, the related theory that minorities caused the housing crash is already mainstream. It doesn’t seem too much of stretch to imagine ‘crash the economy for soshulism’ becoming respectable, even if it were only a minority view.
MeDrewNotYou
@NonyNony: Heh. Touche. A country with an anti-masonry party doesn’t have much to dumb down to. My history is rusty, but didn’t we have an explicitly anti-papist party too? Not to mention the Know Nothings…
b-psycho
“guaranteed annual income”…
So Milton Friedman was a soshulist?
MeDrewNotYou
@Uloborus: Actually, I think General Stuck stated it much better than me (and faster too!)
This, especially the first sentence, is what I was trying to get at.
Edit-bolding fail
Dennis SGMM
@NonyNony:
To my mind, the real dumbassery of the run up to the Civil War was in not telling the Confederate states to take their thin-skinned overweening pride, their dumbass institutions and their broke down economies and just go away until poverty and hookworm made them amenable to reason.
We’re already at, or damned close to, the kind of concentration of wealth that exemplified the Gilded Age. The only difference now is the number of voices calling upon us to appreciate the wealthy.
El Cid
It’s quite impressive. The world’s largest economy, what, a $13 trillion GDP / year?
And here the whole system was brought to its knees by a small number of black folks who bought a portion of all mortgages which were classified as sub-prime.
Following Fox-Piven, ACORN then manipulated lenders to resell to banks who bundled them together with other qualities of mortgages to create ‘tranches’ of imaginary groups as securitized investment products. And so on and so forth until nominally there were hundreds of $trillions$ of imaginary investment instruments in play, all dependent up on the bubble of housing prices, just like Jimmy Carter’s CRA made them do.
ACORN also fooled Phil Gramm into forcing Bill Clinton into the Commodities Futures Modernization Act into the long-delayed, last Federal budget, which had been held off until after Bush V. Gore.
Never doubt that a small number of devious darkies can change the world, even destroy it.
Suffern ACE
@Dennis SGMM: Oh, those voices protecting the wealthy have always been around as well. I like though how they conspiracy theories keep brining up names I had forgotten. It’s been a long time since I thought about Francis Fox Piven. She’s almost 80 now and I hope she is doing well.
MeDrewNotYou
@El Cid: Don’t be ridiculous. Blacks aren’t smart enough to plan that out. There’s a Jew behind all of it. Maybe Lenny Kravitz; he’d cover both groups. Muslims are bad too, so maybe they pitched in with some oil money.
WyldPirate
You know, this is off topic, but if you want to see everything that is wrong with the fucking Dems right now, then watch this segment from Maddow’s show.
Dems saying over and over that they think the way forward is to “compromise” with the Rethugs. Harry Reid (he is meat and no great loss as he is a weak-kneed ineffectual POS). And then clip after clip of the Rethugs saying “no comp[romise” period.
Unbelievable. Obama is going to be one-termer. Get ready for Presnit Snowbilly.
MeDrewNotYou
@WyldPirate: I have no basis for saying this, and really it might just be wishful thinking, but maybe Dems are just preening for voters who like ‘compromise’ and ‘bipartisanship.’ After all the shit they’ve put up with the past 2yrs, I can’t imagine Obama really thinks he can get anything constructive done with the Republicans (Stuff like ‘fixing’ SS by cutting benefits doesn’t count). Harry Reid is always a disappointment, but even he can’t be that blind. Whether Reid lets the Senate get slapped around is another question.
Even though Obama is obviously a non-confrontational, “let’s all get along” type guy at heart, he has to know that the Right is out to absolutely destroy him. I don’t know how much and how well he’ll fight back, but we know the dude can fight back. Hopefully we’ll get a little bit of campaign Obama back.
I pray to FSM that this isn’t all wishful thinking.
Uloborus
@MeDrewNotYou:
Obama has said flat-out he has no reason to compromise with Republicans. To their faces.
The long history is that obviously crazy candidates lose. Sometimes people like ‘stupid and folksy’, but ‘raving and furious’ does not win much on a national level. Talking about bipartisanship makes him look like the adult in a room of wailing children. It might have something to do with why in the middle of a horrific recession his poll numbers 2 years in knock the socks off of, say, Reagan at this point in his career.
jl
So, by that standard, the AIG financial insurance fraud and malfeasance was a communist plot. Am my right, or what?
jl
@El Cid:
Sounds realistic to me. Social democrats are fiendishly clever and play the long game.
The anti communist scare mongers were correct towards the end of the Cold War too. The more the Soviet Union creaked, and slumped and collapsed on all fronts, the more they saw through the USSR’s fiendish plot of playing possum, and the more they warned us poor innocent dupes that the West were falling into an inescapable death trap.
VixenStrangely
When I heard Bush utter the words “ownership society”–I hollered, “Oh just fucking fine, the poor people are going to buy houses for the banks, with money they don’t have, and banks aren’t even going to want those houses.”
I didn’t have a blog back then, or people would think I was all prophetic and stuff, because I would really have posted that thing. But I told my mom about it, and she would tell you I totes said that if I gave you her e-mail addy, if she ever got one, which I think she hasn’t yet. Although my brother totally showed her how to use a computer….
Anyway, what I’m saying is–I usually think of conspiracies as initiating in a “top-down” manner, where elites plot from positions of leverage to accomplish audacious goals. And yet, this surmise seems to operate from the idea that out-groups struggling towards a certain American dream, were to blame, which reminds me of the claim of every grifter regarding “marks”: “You can not cheat an honest man”–but of course, you can. You only need to lie. The real construction should be: you can not cheat a broke person and expect your money. The banksters got had by investing in debt. They had a lot of paper wealth, but failed to see if any of that paper was really green.
Who needs ACORN when any conservatives prove to be as dumb as that? They didn’t know broke folks were actually broke! And they invested in that! They gave loans to bad credit risks! HHAHAHAHAHAH–because they thought someone, somewhere would pay the interest. They didn’t realize rich people had all the money, and that poor folks often do lose jobs.
Then they wondered why they didn’t get paid back. I would’ve had a sad for capitalism, but the economy eated it, because it was hungry. It lost its house that kept it so safe. But maybe we can haz soshialism instead. Plz? Or even a centrist democratic version thereof? I might enjoy that.
jl
@VixenStrangely: Well, your story is more plausible than the banksters and their lobbyists. I watched some Congressional testimony, and the bank lobbyists’ explanations were bizarre, to put it charitably.
When talking about proposed financial regulations to stop it from happening again, the lobbyists were falling over themselves explaining how smart and all knowing the market was. Rationale, a vast and unbeatable calculation machine that cranked out the right answer day and night. Any meddlesome gummint regulations would gum up the magic hyper rationality of the market.
So, some Congressperson on their toes thought to ask how this amazing market brain could make such bad mistakes, since the whole thing could not have happened unless the banks had chosen to adopt the supposedly bad government regulations and ACORN strategies on a far wider scale than they needed too, and in broad areas where there was no push from ACORN like groups at all.
Then the lobbyists started waving their hands and talking about how the government policies were a virus, and infectious contagious virus that spread like wildfire, you see. An epidemic caused by THIS BAD IDEA VIRUS. Their ravings made not one lick of sense. But they said it with such serious thoughtfulness, that it almost sounded sensible, for maybe two seconds.
Nick
@MeDrewNotYou:
too bad when he does, NO ONE BACKS HIM THE FUCK UP!
Nick
@NonyNony:
the morning after Dubya was reelected, my cousin in Britain said to me on the phone
“We only war we’re glad we lost is American War of Independence. We dodged a bloody bullet”
sven
@El Cid:
Who do you think was behind the Teapot Dome Scandal?
What about Warren G. Harding’s death?
The USS Maine?
It all fits together, if you are just willing to connect the dots!
balconesfault
My favorite conspiracy theory has always been that Bush was working as a Chinese agent his whole Presidency (remember – the longest trip abroad GW Bush ever took before becoming Prez was one to China for 6 weeks back in 1975). I think he was programmed to come back, become President, and systematically act in a way throughout his Presidency to destroy America’s economy and reputation, and squander jobs, markets, and diplomatic channels for China to scoop up.
Seriously – if Bush had been a Manchurian Candidate, what would he have done differently?