Excellent Example Of Liberalizm's End Game

A little town in Rhode Island shows where liberalism and all its talk of economic "security" ultimately leads — a stale economy and suffocating dependence on big government.

In a surprisingly candid and lengthy expose, the Washington Post described how Woonsocket, an economically depressed town in Rhode Island, has been turned upside down by food stamps.

With a third of the town enrolled, food stamps have created a huge boom-and-bust economy in Woonsocket, as residents pour into grocery stores on the first day of each month after the government pumps $2 million into their food stamp cards.

Many of the jobs in Woonsocket depend on food stamps, the Post found, with part-time work "clustered around the first of the month."

The heavy reliance on food stamps has also encouraged a variety of weird and irresponsible behavior.

One shopper profiled by the Post paid cash for lunch at Burger King after spending the morning buying $200 worth of groceries with food stamps.

Others end up paying $5 for cab rides home on the first of the month, because the buses are too packed with food shoppers.

Still others jam their carts full at the local Wal-Mart the last night of the month, waiting until the clock strikes midnight to put it all on their food stamp cards.

No matter how well-meaning programs like food stamps are, they can end up draining the dignity and self-respect of those who rely on them.

And despite what liberals claim, they don't stimulate the economy, but distort it in ways that make real growth and prosperity all the more difficult.

Worse, businesses get sucked into this dependency cycle as well. As the Post reports, restaurants are engaged in a "major lobbying campaign" to lift the ban on using food stamps for prepared food.

As a result, a program designed to provide short-term, temporary aid suddenly becomes a way of life.

For the Obama administration, none of this is a cause for concern, but a reason to celebrate.

In fact, a top priority of the Agriculture Department — charged with running food stamps — is to expand the program so people can access it "easily and with dignity and respect."

That, along with Obama's lousy economic recovery, has driven food stamp enrollment up 43% since 2009.

If Obama has his way, we'll all end up living like those poor folks in Woonsocket.

http://news.investors.com/ibd-edito...stamps-turn-rhode-island-town-upside-down.htm

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One other pillar of the liberal Democrats' systematic takeover genuinely was a conscious conspiracy — no conspiracy theory — and has even received belated recognition recently.

If you are old enough, you can remember Democrats such as Ted Kennedy, in their rare candid moments, rhapsodizing that someday, when they could get 50% of the U.S. population plus one receiving a government check of some kind, they would never again lose a national election! The notorious but true 47% cited by Mitt Romney apparently is close enough.

Then, an especially vile tributary of this liberal Democrat cynicism is what they have done to destroy the U.S. underclass, especially the black underclass.

This tragedy can be exposed via one rhetorical question: What would happen to the Democrats if all the poor in this country suddenly became rich? They'd never win another election, would they?

So the Democrats have a vested need to keep the poor down. Our permanent welfare class is no accident. Government incentives for people to stay poor may be well-calculated.

But with a repressed minority manipulated into believing that Democrats are on its side, now to be joined via immigration by a large number of Hispanics that the Dems see as captive voters, the new U.S. demographics make the liberal Democrats' scheme to finesse a permanent one-party government a near certainty.

Welcome to our brave new world of Amerika, the radical transformation Barack Obama promised.

Don't agree? Think about who runs the Democratic Party today. They are the remnants of the '60s and '70s radicals, grown older if not grown up (see Nancy Pelosi, Howard Dean, etc.).

And what were they back then? Fellow travelers of the international leftist movement — that is, socialists and Marxists — in case you don't recall, and they seem not to have changed much given how much GDP they seek to control.

These are the people who rooted for the North in the Vietnam War, and then did everything they could to undermine the Iraq War. (See Harry Reid's "This war is lost.")

The worst is yet to come.

Perhaps you've noticed a negative change in political tactics in our country. It all may have started with the tendency of liberal audiences on college campuses to shout down any speakers they disagree with, a revelation of intolerance of diversity of opinion.

A frequent harbinger has been the "politics of personal destruction," diversionarily decried by Democrats and liberals but energetically practiced by their side against anyone who is a threat to them. (Recall the origin of the term "Borking" and the "lynching" of Clarence Thomas.)

Another symptom is the Democrats' heavy-handed, even brutal, proclivity to criminalize any opposition to their agenda, i.e., a blood sport political orientation of "we will not only ruin you, we will prosecute you." (Remember how the Clintons tried to railroad an innocent man named Billy Dale into prison just because he was in the way of some patronage jobs.)

In other words, the liberal Democrats in the U.S. have been inadvertently revealing hints for years about their proto-Stalinist tendencies.

Almost all of organized human life has been lived under dictatorship. There have been only a few exceptions in all of history, notably the last couple of centuries in much of the West.

It simply has taken slightly over two centuries for that type of ruling group, the autocratic dictatorship type, to take control in the United States. Expect more demonstrations of it.

As Bill O'Reilly of FoxNews, has said, "People fear the left because the left is vicious."

True, and that is exactly their intention, as the most ruthless dictators of the last century understood. It is called reign of terror, and it is the most efficient way of seizing power.

This is not your father's Democrat party. Ultra-leftists such as modern U.S. liberals reveal their totalitarian proclivities in many subtle ways — and some that are not so subtle.

The preceding recitation is of the latter kind. (So is prohibiting purchase of more than 16 ounces of pop, though of a lesser magnitude.)

Today's emboldened liberals are carelessly showing their true colors.

And did you see the latest advice to Obama from liberal icon Harry Belafonte — to simply imprison any who disagree with him? As the left realizes that it has finally achieved permanent rule in the U.S., the gloves will really come off. Farewell free country.

I'm glad I lived when I did. The future appears bleak, auguring even a second Dark Ages as our country's inevitable collapse allows for world domination by China and Islam.

What plans do you suppose they have for our people, in the post-American period?

In telling my poor millennial students how glad I am that I won't be around to share the future with them, I offer: As the robot said to its doomed crewmates in the first "Alien" movie, "You have my sympathy."

The U.S. populace has simply become too ignorant, stupid and weak (qualities reflected in those it chooses to send to Washington) for the nation to survive.

The country is committing slow-motion assisted suicide — maybe not so slow anymore.

It must be said because the tipping point has been passed: The liberal Democrats are literally destroying America. Have a nice day.

• Gaski, Ph.D., an associate professor at the University of Notre Dame Mendoza College of Business, is a former Democrat; his primary research area is social and political power.

http://news.investors.com/ibd-edito...on-votes-by-those-who-take-welfare.htm?p=full

 

Our company (which is a food company) like many other like manufacturers, spends the majority of our trade dollars at the beginning of the month on entry price brands, because that's when the SNAP participants get paid. Google midnight Walmart Shopping for more detail on how people wait outside until 12:01am when the money gets put on their cards and they can eat.

Some families go hungry for days before the first of the month, many of them with children. The $$ they get simply won't make it for a full month anymore (inflation). This is the legacy that Obama and Ben Bernanke will have. My only hope is that one day God, or the Universe, or any karma higher entity will exact payment for rising to leadership and then failing to lead, or worse - creating misery - to further a personal agenda.