March 6th, 2025
To the Editor:
How many times do you wonder why poverty continues to expand and so few achieve a successful path out? Is there a plan to keep it that way? Some facts would point to yes. Who are the people who wanted more power, influence and/or financial gain both politically and in academia. In 1964 LBJ bagan The Great Society better known as the War of Poverty. Racist LBJ stated (heard on audio recording still available today) “We’ll get those *n* on welfare and we’ll have their vote for the next 100 years”. His goal; destroy the family unit by creating large blocks of poor communities with fatherless homes to become socially engineered government dependents. And it worked!!!
Less than seven years later Columbia Univ. Professors Richard Clowerd’s and Francis Piven presented their “ Clowerd/Piven Strategy”. Their goal; to install socialism and a guaranteed universal basic income. Does that sound familiar today? The strategy; flood society with outreach through advertisements, grow unrest, enlarge the welfare state beyond capacity. Look it up!
Ten years later another Columbia student/alumni Barack Obama spent billions promoting a larger welfare population with distribution of brochures in schools, churches, libraries, hired outreach tables in hospitals, civic centers, ads on TV, radio, and billboards. Throughout the country, his promotions were everywhere including two billboards in Fillmore on Hwy 126, as you entered from the east and one from the west. You couldn’t go a day without hearing or seeing the ads and promotions. Then the last four years of Biden (probably Obama in charge with a continued push) practically finished the process. Up to 12 million border crossings were attached to the maximum welfare entitlements and shelter.
Included in Clowerd/Pivin Strategy were Saul Alinsky rules; use of class and ethnic friction by militant low income organizations (nonprofit/NGO,USAID) who declare the poor victims of pervasive oppression and injustice, unable to rise from poverty without a socialist revolution. BLM? Sound familiar? Is the Clowerd/Piven Strategy alive today? Point out welfare’s failures and you’ll hear cries of “children who experience malnutrition” and claims of deprived children whose parents can’t “buy the child an ice cream cone” an “economic imbalance” as Kelly Scoles wrote last week. Please answer, what is your fair share of what someone else worked for? Emotions won’t solve the real problem. Does it make sense the more EBT given, the less availability of nutritional food is available at large corporate markets like Kroger, Albertsons? Follow the money. Thankfully antitrust law stopped that buyout/merger attempt. We’re consuming more calories but receiving less nutrients needed. Thus, we’re getting fatter. Sorry Kelly you feel I “ungraciously” used the word fat, would obese sound softer?
Generations of families are stuck on welfare, becoming a lifestyle for far too many. Isn’t welfare temporary for those capable of working? Not today! Ask a small business owner how many times they’ve offered employment, only to be turned down if he/she won’t pay in cash under the table to allow welfare benefits to continue. Just ask, I have. Shouldn’t we be promoting development to a person’s capacity with work that’s rewarded and better living conditions instead of locked in lives of government dependency? Maybe the problem is a poor education and inability to qualify? For many that may be true. What or whose responsibility? Are poverty rates a result of a planned process toward socialism? Or did it just “happen”? The left pushed it and the right did nothing to stop it. Until now!!!
We are $36 trillion in debt! This cannot continue. We’re now seeing how USAID wasted billions through a grift of kick-backs from the nonprofit/NGO system. More will be exposed in the next months. There’s a reason the Biden crime family and others received pardons!!! Fixing what’s broken after creating it and ignoring the waste, fraud and abuse for so long won’t be easy. Everyone needs to take responsibility.
Jean McLeod,
Fillmore, Ca.