As a Democratic administration and Congress threaten to turn America into a welfare state on the disastrous European model, this interview from Front Page Magazine is worth noting. 

Jamie Glazov interviews Martin Durkin.

Durkin: To most people, I imagine, welfare seems an obviously good thing. But in fact the corrosive and iniquitous side of welfare has been evident for many decades. It’s only now that people are poking their heads out of the trench and daring to say so. You can see the devastating effects of welfare in Britain, for example, in the exponential rise in single motherhood. The figures are astonishing. In the 1950s almost all children in Britain were brought up by their natural parents. Today, only around half the children in Britain are brought up by their natural parents. Half!

FP: Why has that happened? 

Durkin: To see why that happened, let me paint you a picture. In the 1950s, the typical working man and his wife In Britain lived in an income-tax free existence. They kept every penny they earned. For an unmarried teenager, there was no council flat (the ‘projects’ I think you call them), no rent rebate, no rate rebate, no housing benefit or anything else. The burden of looking after her and the child fell on her family, friends or charity. Parents who discovered their daughters were pregnant were understandably furious – because they had to pick up the tab. That’s why Dad stomped round to the family of the boy responsible, to call him to account. They boy’s family understood the full economic implications of making babies and came down on him like a ton of bricks. From the real economic relationships there arose a real moral code – the value and the cost of things were clear. The growth of welfare benefits has been huge since that time. And within that system a pregnant girl gets special treatment (top of the state housing list etc). The fear has gone. The old idea, “Don’t, for heaven’s sake, get pregnant. It would be a disaster” has gone. For many girls, getting pregnant is a ticket to get out of the parental home. This has been the subject of detailed studies. A ten percent increase in benefits, one of them finds, tends to increase the prevalence of single mothers by 17 percent.

FP: How has the Left played a role in this development?

Durkin: This whole trend in social policy was fuelled by the anti-family views of the left. The family was bourgeois. Divorce was even celebrated (at least among the serious Left and among tougher feminists). I suppose they thought they were doing young girls a favor. If they did, they were fatted-headed idiots. The effect is disastrous for all those involved. The levels of depression, violence and criminality among lone parents (and their wayward children and transient partners) is heartbreaking. As one commentator puts it, “The evidence that lone parents – and indeed those who cohabit – are very more likely to be victims of violence is worldwide, consistent and overwhelming.” In Britain single parents are about 20 times more likely to suffer domestic violence. A child of a single parent is 15 times more likely to be abused than a child brought up by two natural parents. A child brought up by their natural mother and a cohabite (non natural father) is at even greater risk – 19 times more likely to suffer violence and 74 times more likely to be killed. It’s awful. To catalogue in detail the full devastating effects of welfare – also for example the crippling effects on men who are out of work – would take ages.

 FP: Ok, but tell us some more negative effects.

 Durkin: Overall, I think in general the bigger evil effects of welfare have been enormously underestimated, even by commentators who regard themselves as more pro-capitalist in their sympathies. Welfare is the basic cause of the deleterious cultural changes we have witnessed in the West over the past 60 years. The Welfare State, pioneered in Britain of course, has corrupted this country to its core. It has transformed the country caricatured by Noel Coward and others – essentially pretty decent, self-reliant, and plucky – into a country which is thuggish, selfish, mindless, dispirited and lost. Gone is the British stiff upper lip. Modern Britons are moaning, self-pitying inadequates. The welfare state has bred a generation of obnoxious, drug-addled criminals and ne’er-do-wells. It has also, incidentally, burdened what was once the world’s biggest, most dynamic economy with the dead weight of an obstructive and vastly expensive state machine. I’m sorry to sound cross about this, but I don’t think people fully realise what’s happened. Britain has, I think, the highest crime rate of any industrialised country in the world. It is twice as high as the US. The violent crime rate is higher in London than New York. Britain has the highest rate of drug abuse, the highest teenage pregnancy rate and the highest rate of sexually transmitted disease in the modern industrial world. What the hell happened?

FP: So what the hell happened? 

Durkin: The logic is inescapable. Each slice of do-gooder social policy has had its own tragic, unintended effects. The weight and quality of evidence leaves no room for doubt. The Welfare State has been an unremitting disaster, beyond any hope of reform. It is not that the welfare state isn’t functioning properly, it is that the welfare state is in essence degrading. In the US, I think much the same can be said of the effects of welfare on the black community. How did we get from the nobility of Martin Luther King, to the sordid, gun-toting, rantings of the gangster rappers? Does the Left imagine that this represents liberation? Larry Elder and others have no doubt what’s to blame. The story goes back to Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, which had people going door to door, encouraging people to get on welfare. Now, I understand, nearly 70 percent of today’s black children are born out of wedlock. It can be demonstrated beyond any shadow of a doubt that the modern ‘cultural trends’ which we lament have an economic cause, and are a direct result of state intervention. The Left do not see economic necessity as a proper reflection of actual human relationships, but some capitalist carbuncle. It’s clear now that in removing economic necessity from people’s lives (which is what welfare does), we risk sinking into barbarism.

 David Limbaugh asks his fellow conservatives:

Could you tell me under what moral principle you would advocate, say, conservative cooperation with liberal legislation during Obama’s "honeymoon" period that would further dismantle America’s capitalistic system or undermine our national security?

Right before the election, I wrote that Obama worries me because of his leftist ideas and the Saul Alinsky (Chicago-style, thuggish) tactics his campaign and its surrogates were using to secure the election. Now adding to my concern is all this talk about a new day in America and the need for bipartisanship, which is just an effort at soft intimidation and a strategy to shame the opposition from exercising its vigilance and acting as the opposition party. But even that would be far less troubling if there were fewer gullible people on our side.

Perhaps it’s Obama’s messianic aura and rhetorical generalities of harmonic convergence that blind "intellectuals" to his radicalism and deceive them into believing he’ll govern as a centrist. Maybe it’s his fluency and mellifluous voice that separate pro-life advocates such as Doug Kmiec from their critical faculties to the point they could argue that this poster child for Planned Parenthood was the more pro-life of the two presidential candidates. Even the conservative Wall Street Journal editors must have taken a quick slug of the Kool-Aid before opining that Obama now faces "a much greater foe: Democrats on Capitol Hill," who will try to pull this presumed pragmatist to the left.

Dream on, boys. They’ll be headed west together as fast as their partisan legs can carry them. And we better be ready for them, believing our own instincts and powers of observation rather than relying on the lying eyes of our elites and the false assurances of our political opponents who will tell us that left means center and wrong means right.

What is it about Obama’s leftist past and record as the most liberal senator that so many intelligent people do not understand?

 The moment of decision has arrived.

Crunch time.

Is the economic crisis to be solved by a capitalist free-market solution, or made worse by a socialist ‘solution’?

Make no mistake about it – it was caused by socialism: by political correctness, by multiculturalism, by government interference in the market.

It was NOT caused by the Bush administration, by the Republican Party, by capitalism, as the Democrats who did cause it are now alleging to cover their guilt.

Among the most guilty men are Jimmy Carter, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, Harry Reid.   

Jimmy Carter.  1977. The Community Reinvestment Act. Banks must make loans to high-risk borrowers.  Opened door for ACORN (see earlier posts) to force banks to make sub-prime loans to uncreditworthy borrowers.

Barack Obama.  Trained staff for Madeline Talbott, ‘key pioneer of ACORN’s subprime racket’ as Stanley Kurtz calls her, to run her ‘subprime-loan shakedown racket’.  ACORN employed him as its lawyer. And he funded it through the Woods Fund and indirectly through the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. In three years in the Senate, Obama received more contributions from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac than anyone else save Dodd, who got his contributions from them over eleven years.   He appointed two Fannie Mae CEOs as advisors to his campaign.  

Bill Clinton, devotee of multiculturalism, pressed for more home-ownership by those who could not afford it, minorities and in effect even illegal immigrants, and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac responded, buying up hundreds of billions of dollars of the bad loans and sellng them on the world markets. 

Harry Reid. In 2005 when John McCain sponsored a Fannie-Freddie reform bill,  he led the  Democrats in crushing it.  Fannie and Freddie were created by Democrats and Democrats are most responsible for their failure.

Barney Frank and Chris Dodd who ran Congress’s banking panels, vigorously and persistently opposed Republican Party efforts to regulate Fannie and Freddie.

McCain has repeatedly called for reforming Fannie and Freddie. President Bush – whose administration is being blamed for the crisis by Frank, Dodd, Reid etc – urged their reform 17  times this year. The irony of Bush and the Republicans being blamed now for the catastrophe the Democrats’  so insistently brought about!   

The cure now is not more socialism, not more government control of the market, not the election of the most socialist-minded candidate for the presidency ever – Barack Obama. 

If America elects Obama, it will be choosing socialism, and socialism has failed wherever it has been tried.

America needs to choose capitalism at this moment in history, to save itself and to give hope to the wider world. Otherwise this crisis will be turned into an American and world-wide disaster from which there may be no foreseeable return. 

 This from the Investor’s Business Daily:

Obama in a statement yesterday blamed the shocking new round of subprime-related bankruptcies on the free-market system, and specifically the "trickle-down" economics of the Bush administration, which he tried to gig opponent John McCain for wanting to extend.

But it was the Clinton administration, obsessed with multiculturalism, that dictated where mortgage lenders could lend, and originally helped create the market for the high-risk subprime loans now infecting like a retrovirus the balance sheets of many of Wall Street’s most revered institutions.

Tough new regulations forced lenders into high-risk areas where they had no choice but to lower lending standards to make the loans that sound business practices had previously guarded against making. It was either that or face stiff government penalties.

Obama’s ‘remedies’ would make matters much worse, the editorial declares.

Read the whole thing here.

 Whether out of ignorance – which is inexcusable – or to serve some alarming purpose, the DNC gave a platform to America’s worst enemy.

Last week’s opening festivities at the Democrat National Convention in Denver began with an interfaith prayer. As the Democrat Party searches for its newfound interest in faith, it quickly called upon one of the lowest hanging fruit in the American Muslim community – the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). Ingrid Mattson, the President of ISNA gave a speech along with Adbur-Rahim Ali of the Northeast Denver Islamic Center. Some may dismiss the selection of nine speakers of faith at the political shindig as irrelevant and simply part of the pomp and circumstance of the DNC Convention.

But propping up ISNA in today’s environment is akin to propping up the Legal Guild (a ‘60s Communist front group) to address the convention during the Cold War. Our civil servants will verify that they have prevented over 30 attacks by militant Islamists upon our nation and our citizens since 9/11. The only ideology that unites the groups set upon our destruction is not violence. It is political Islam – their Islamism. Unless we identify both violent and non-violent political Islam as a root cause of terrorism we will never win this conflict. Militant Islamists, much as non-militant Islamists, seek some form of a transnational Muslim, political movement. They both seek various forms of the ascendancy of Islam with respect to other religions culminating in the establishment of Islamic states.

 

Read the whole article by an anti-jihad Muslim here.

 Dennis Prager examines what Obama actually said in Berlin and finds ignorance, distortion and naivete. 

For instance:

Obama: "Where the last war had ended, another World War could have easily begun. All that stood in the way was Berlin."

 In his attempt to exaggerate the role of Berlin before his large Berlin audience, Obama made a claim that simply makes no sense. "Berlin stood in the way" of another World War beginning? How? If anything, Berlin was the flash point of East-West tension and therefore could have triggered a war.

Read the whole excellent comment here.     

 The visits of Barack Obama and two other senators to Afghanistan and Iraq, brief as they were, may have had some point to them. But It’s hard to discern the purpose of letting this posturizing, gum-chewing, know-nothing-done-nothing egotist cavort round three European capitals, declaiming his empty rhetoric and acting as if he were President of the United States. One wonders why President Sarkozy was willing to play a ceremonious part in the charade. Has the little trip given Obama valuable experience of the world so that he can formulate wise foreign policy? These crazy theatrics should be an embarrassment to the Democrats, and would be if the Party as a whole weren’t so far gone in craziness as even to think of putting up such a fellow for the office of president.  He has done nothing for his country. His associates have been criminals, terrorists, slum-developers, Communists, hate-preachers. When one remembers the great men of extraordinary achievement and ability, and  high probity, like Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Lincoln, Reagan to whom they now propose that this fellow could be a successor, one can scarcely believe such a degeneration of values can have come about. Will voters wake up in time from the strange mad dream into which the sonorous speechifying of this lightweight politician has lulled many of them, and save their country and the world from the irreversible disaster that his election would bring? 

… is feeling good about themselves.

That is all.

Read more about it here.

 Is the Democratic Party ignorant of Islam’s intentions? Or do they want to see those intentions realized? 

The story below raises these questions.

A group hired by the Democratic Party to register voters is in trouble for vote fraud in Louisiana:State probes voter registration drive — Baton Rouge, LA.

Secretary of State Jay Dardenne said Tuesday he will meet today with a Democrat-affiliated group responsible for a voter registration effort that is inundating East Baton Rouge and other parish registrars with bogus and incomplete applications.

Dardenne said his investigators are trying to determine if any state election laws have been violated as thousands of voter registration cards have been dumped on registrars offices through the efforts of VIP. “We have some very real concerns about the data we are getting from them,” Dardenne said.

VIP is a Washington, D.C., group hired by national Democrats to register some 70,000 new voters in advance of the presidential and other federal elections this fall.

“With an effort this big there’s always going to be glitches and problems along these lines,” said Brian Welsh, communications director for the Democrats’ Louisiana Victory 2008.

So who is “VIP?”

VIP is an operation run by the Muslim American Society, a front group for the jihad movement known as the Muslim Brotherhood. But don’t take my word for it; here’s a detailed report on the Muslim American Society from the Investigative Project.

Are the Democrats so desperate to get Barack Obama elected that they’ll climb into bed with one of the most notorious radical Islamic groups in the world—a group that is openly dedicated to destroying Western civilization and establishing a global caliphate?

It would seem so.

Here’s an LGF search with much more information about the Muslim American Society, their support for suicide bombings and jihad, and their connections to the Muslim Brotherhood.