When President Obama's former chief of staff Rahm Emanuel said that "you never want a serious crisis to go to waste," many didn't realize he was inaugurating a new credo for governance.
Rahm's statement was originally understood as the administration's intention to capitalize on actual crises while they were hot, to promote legislation liberals had craved for decades but didn't have public support to pass. But some suspected he was talking about manufactured crises, as well.
I usually avoid conspiracy-type theories, especially where Obama is concerned because his policies and tactics are so egregious on their own that I see no reason to risk undermining the credibility of our criticisms by indulging those too much. But I do think it's interesting that an infamous radical professor duo, Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, and Obama mentor Saul Alinsky advocated the strategic use of manufactured crises to advance the leftist political agenda.
I don't know whether Obama is deliberately, religiously following a Cloward-Piven/Alinsky strategy as many have argued, but I think it speaks volumes to show that he is employing the despicable tactics those radicals recommended. So please set aside the conspiracy theory distraction for a moment and focus on what Obama is doing, irrespective of where he got the idea. Whether or not Obama retires to his residential suite every night and prays to these radicals and reads their hymnals, he is singing their tunes.
Keep in mind that I'm not even talking about the big Cloward-Piven goal of "overloading the U.S. public welfare system in order to precipitate a crisis that would lead to a replacement of the welfare system with a national system of 'a guaranteed annual income and thus an end to poverty,'" as Wikipedia describes it, although it would be fascinating to examine Obama's record in light of that goal, as well, as some have. I'm only addressing their manufactured-crisis strategy to achieve a policy agenda.
So here is a non-exhaustive sampling.
Obama used the actual financial crisis we were experiencing (largely as a result of liberal policies that he himself endorsed -- and continues to endorse) to press for his stimulus package. Over and over, he told us that we had to act "now" to overcome this crisis. As it turned out, he wasn't nearly so quick in spending the money and implementing the stimulus program as he was in using the crisis to get it through Congress. The delays in implementing it and the non-stimulative effect of most of the expenditures are now legendary. How are those jump-started jobs working out?
He created a crisis atmosphere to justify his takeover of GM and Chrysler. He has repeatedly attempted to suggest we have an infrastructure crisis (claiming stable bridges are about to crumble) in order to push further stimulus packages. Obama described the state of our health care as a national crisis in order to force through Obamacare. He even treated existing nuclear arsenals as a crisis and said that ratification of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with Russia was a matter of utmost urgency.
He said we had to act immediately by passing the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill in order to avert another potential banking collapse. "We cannot delay action any longer," he said. "Every day we don't act, the same system that led to bailouts remains in place. ... And if we don't change what led to the crisis, we'll doom ourselves to repeat it."
When it served his purposes, Obama even suggested we have a debt crisis, which he now adamantly denies. His Twitter feed said, "Tweet at your Republican legislators and urge them to support a bipartisan compromise on the debt crisis."
Obama depicted the Gulf oil spill as a national crisis in order to justify re-imposing his coveted ban on offshore drilling. He consistently used alarmist rhetoric and fear-mongering over highly disputed nightmare environmental predictions to promote cap and trade, his war on all kinds of domestic energy production, his newly imposed fuel efficiency standards and his disgraceful green energy projects.
Unable to learn his lesson from the housing crisis, Obama was determined to repeat the mistake with a $75 billion program to prevent nationwide mortgage foreclosures, which he described as a "crisis unlike we've ever known." He said, "If we act boldly and swiftly to arrest this downward spiral, then every American will benefit." Just this week, by the way, he's resurrecting the same insane idea -- urging banks to make more uncreditworthy loans.
And can anyone deny Obama predicted a crisis for the sequestration?
Circling back to what prompted this column, on Wednesday, Obama characterized gun deaths as a national crisis. He said, "Every day that we wait to do something about (gun deaths), even more of our fellow citizens are stolen from our lives by a bullet from a gun."
How many times can this man cry wolf?
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