Month: May 2009

ACORN revelations and creating crisis

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Following up on Ann’s post earlier today, Bring us your poor and angry!, I’m posting  this article from World Net Daily, ACORN born in leftist revolution, by Jerome Corsi. It’s a good short summary of the Cloward-Piven strategy which seeks, to quote David Horowitz’s website Discover the Networks, “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.”

It has four good links in it, and I’ll give them to you here in case you want to go directly to them for more information. 

The first is to the original article by Cloward and Piven in the Nation in 1966 (though registration is required).

Second, the Discover the Networks page is here, and in addition to a very good article on the strategy it has more links to related articles.

Third, Sol Stern had a long and detailed article on ACORN in the City Journal of Spring 2003 titled ACORN’s Nutty Regime for Cities.

And fourth, here’s Jim Simpson’s American Thinker piece from September 28, 2008, titled Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis. Ann discussed this article when it first came out.

One reason I’m writing this post is that we’re sure to write more on the subject and I like to have the links handy.  Over the 1-3/4 years we’ve been doing Refugee Resettlement Watch, we’ve discovered that there is much more to refugee matters than it first appeared. As with many social phenomena, the left finds refugees and refugee resettlement useful for various purposes. Now that we’re seeing revelations about how far-reaching and well-funded ACORN is, we want to know more about where our particular topic fits in and how it is possibly being used to help create chaos and revolution.

Addendum: Jim Simpson just sent me the links to the other two articles in his series on the Cloward-Piven strategy: Part I,  Manufactured Crisis and Part III, Conspiracy of the Lemmings. Part II is the link from the American Thinker, above. All very worthwhile reading for understanding what is going on.

Rumor: Refugees are getting larger SSI payments than American citizens

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

We’re launching a new category this morning, obviously titled “Rumors.”   One of the most important reforms the Refugee Resettlement industry must make is to promote transparency (where have I heard that word before?) in how the program operates.    The result of the present obvious strategy of keeping the public in the dark about the program is that “rumors” get a life of their own.   We want to find the facts!

The “rumor” of the day is that the Obama Stimulus plan gives refugees larger Supplemental Security Income (SSI) increases than American citizens are receiving.

True or false?    Would a reader who knows the answer please give us the facts.

Two Washington Post readers show good sense on refugees

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Two letters to the Washington Post make an interesting postscript to my post the other day about Iraqi refugees and the Post’s article on Nazaar Joodi, the refugee who was headed for a homeless shelter. They’re so good, in fact, that I’m making this separate post about them. (Are there too many “posts” in that sentence?) I’m going to put them both here in their entirety because they’re short and well worth reading.

The first letter is from Gary Kelch of Springfield, Virginia:

When I read the article about the Iraqi refugee Nazaar Joodi [“For Once-Celebrated Iraqi, Life in U.S. One of Lost Hope,” front page, May 10], it was obvious to me that he, like many immigrants to the United States and even a significant number of our native-born citizens, has a fundamental misunderstanding about the great gift this nation provides.

Our nation’s founders never intended for people to be a kept population in which citizenship alone brought wealth and prosperity. This nation provides the gift of opportunity, a safe and cooperative environment where people can strive to achieve wealth and prosperity that are not given but earned. It is a nation dependent on the success of its citizens — and not citizens who serve and are kept by the state.

Later, the article quoted Pary Karadaghi of Kurdish Human Rights Watch as saying of Iraqi refugees in general, “The ones who don’t think America owes them anything are the ones who do best.” This statement applies to everyone, immigrant or citizen. I imagine that Mr. Joodi had a vision of utopia when he brought his family to the United States. Well, this is a utopia but not one of streets paved with gold. It is a utopia where hard work and initiative are rewarded with achievement. With so many citizens of this great nation confused on this point, it is easy to see how a newcomer would also be confused.

Should Mr. Joodi stay in America, it will be difficult for him to succeed but not impossible. What he makes of the opportunity depends on him and no one else.

The second, from Gregory Davis of Oakton, Virginia, says:

As a small-business owner of 22 years, I would gladly hire hardworking individuals such as Mr. Joodi, as would many other small businesses. But the economic system in place must be changed to encourage such efforts. At present, we use subcontractors wherever possible to avoid matching Social Security and Medicare costs, unemployment insurance and other burdensome employee expenses.

Why not allow employers to match the amounts given by county programs and hire people such as Mr. Joodi, offering employment, training and a future? For this to be done, programs would need to be put in place that would compensate employers and exempt us from the excessive costs.

Doesn’t this make more sense than using tax money for temporary solutions that so often end sadly, such as with Mr. Joodi and thousands of others?

Bravo to both.

Comment worth noting: answering Liam

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Comments worth noting is our category for readers comments that are posted now, but on an older post, so it would be unlikely for readers to see them.   I am assuming from past comments that Liam is an Iraqi, but I can’t say for sure.  Liam’s comment to this older post is worth noting because it’s an opportunity to give you additional information.

Liam says:

yes I am asking question

what is the recent arrival of Iraqi families in the USA and which states and which country in the Middle East are they coming from and the dates please

Liam, we are not an agency of the government and so therefore we have no access to the information you are requesting.  We do know that we have brought 9,581 Iraqis to the US this fiscal year that began Oct. 1, 2008.  Where they went in the US, we don’t know.  Where they came from in the Middle East, we don’t know.   The reason we don’t know is that the government and the refugee agencies keep all that secret from the public.

We know all that information is recorded at this office of the US State Department (here), but the average citizen has no access to the data.

Liam said:

all other Iraqi arrival in other countries are getting published

you mention that the USA has resettled 200000 refugees from a different nationalities since 1980
compared to the UK this is very small number

the UK has taken at least four million Iraqis most of them are Kurdish and plenty more from other nationalities

I guess all those other countries publishing data are better than the US, what can I say. We all know the US is the worst country in the world, right Liam?   By the way, there is no way on earth that the UK has taken 4 million Iraqis, but if that  figure is anywhere near being correct, I guess that explains why the UK is having such a horrific experience with immigrants and maybe it’s time they cut back on Middle Easterners in the UK.

Liam said:

every body in the world pay tax not only in the USA
and there is no full employment in any country
and as you know there are plenty of forginers are working in Iraq and getting paid a high salary but Iraqis do not mind

And your point is?

Postville postmortem

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

You can go read the Los Angeles Times update story on the Postville, Iowa meatpacking crooks yourselves, but you won’t read much about the crooks who owned the plant, just the bad federal government for raiding it!    Entitled, “Immigration raid leaves damaging mark on Postville, Iowa,” it ticks me off!   The whole article is about how bad the raid was for the town, and virtually nothing on the lying, cheating crooks who ran the plant—the one’s encouraging illegal immigrants to come there in the first place.

We have written about Postville on many occasions here, especially because plant managers were hauling Somalis and other assorted immigrants to Postville too, further disrupting the small town.

When the meatpacking plant, Agriprocessors Inc., opened in the late 1980s, Orthodox Jews arrived to work as kosher butchers and envisioned a rural paradise for new synagogues and shuls. Migrants, mostly from Guatemala, began arriving in the 1990s — creating an ethnic stew with natives of mostly Eastern European descent.

“Rural paradise,” “ethnic stew,” what a bunch of B.S!