The Patriot Post® · Systemic Poverty: The Ideological Origins of Democrat Party Urban Poverty Plantations
“The mobs of the great cities add just so much to the support of pure government as sores do to the strength of the human body. It is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a republic in vigor. A degeneracy in these is a canker which soon eats to the heart of its laws and constitution.” –Thomas Jefferson (1787)
Nearing the end of the 2012 presidential campaign, Barack Obama and his Leftmedia propaganda machine accused the Romney-Ryan ticket of making an offensive “political gaffe” at a private campaign event five months earlier.
The colossal blunder in question? Romney identified the underbelly of Obama’s socialist political agenda – the fact that an ever-increasing number of “useful idiots” have been lured into subservience by generations of statist Democrat policies, are now dependent on a laundry list of government subsidies, and, consequently, they are very likely to vote for the candidate who will continue redistributing wealth to fund those subsidies.
Romney’s offhand remarks were surreptitiously recorded, and the Obama regime framed the remarks to fit the Left’s socialist dezinformatsia propaganda. Romney said, “There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president, no matter what … who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That’s an entitlement, and the government should give it to them. And they will vote for [Obama] no matter what. … These are people who pay no income tax.”
While Romney’s citation of the percentage of Americans who pay no taxes was correct, and it happens to coincide with Obama’s current poll numbers, which is why he confused the number, clearly Romney was alluding to the fact that 30-35 percent of Obama’s most fervent constituent support is composed of those who are now culturally, if not irrevocably, dependent upon a plethora of government subsidies. These “takers” pay no income tax, and they thus have no direct liability in the economics of wealth redistribution and no stake in curtailing our calamitous national debt.
Indeed, they are “dependent upon government,” and “believe that they are victims, believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, [and] believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it.” Though Romney’s assertion that most Obama supporters are government dependents has generated a flood of outrage on the Left, their underlying indignation is more accurately rooted in the fact that Romney did not declare that ALL Americans are dependent on government, which is more in line with the Left’s agenda.
Fact is, for the next four years after defeating Romney, Obama and his statist Democrats continued to advocate generational policies which institutionalize poverty and subjugate millions of Americans to what are, arguably, “urban poverty plantations” created and sustained by their catastrophically-failed so-called “Great Society” government welfare state programs.
There was nothing new about Romney’s contention regarding the relationship between populist socialism and popular elections. Avowed socialist George Bernard Shaw, co-founder of the London School of Economics, smugly declared at the turn of the 20th century, “A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.”
And those dependents have reliably voted for the hand that feeds them for generations. Demo president Lyndon Baines Johnson, the architect of the Great Society policies, declared in 1964, “I’ll have those ni**ers voting Democratic for the next 200 years.” That was the intended outcome.
For the record, regarding the assertion that today’s Democrat Party is the descendant of the southern Democrats who advocated for slavery in 1860, in fact there are few ideological comparison between Democrats of the old south, and Democrats today. And it was the Democrat presidential administration of John F. Kennedy that made the greatest strides toward racial equality in the early 1960s, only to be hijacked by LBJ and his big government solutions as noted above.
However, there are apt comparisons between the racial outcomes of policies Democrats advocated in 1860 and the policies they advocated now – then being economic institutional slavery on agricultural plantations and now being ideological institutional slavery on urban poverty plantations.
Observations about the inherent threat to Liberty posed by using government graft to by the allegiance of constituents predates Shaw by at least two millennia. Greek Historian Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus wrote, “The real destroyer of the liberties of the people is he who spreads among them bounties, donations and benefits.”
Six centuries earlier, Chinese philosopher Lao-Tzu wrote, “The people suffer from famine because of the multitude of taxes consumed by their superiors. It is through this that they suffer famine.”
And every generation of historians since has likewise noted that long and sordid history of destruction.
In 1753, that founding sage Ben Franklin observed, “Repeal that [welfare] law, and you will soon see a change in their manners. [I]ndustry will increase, and with it plenty among the lower people; their circumstances will mend, and more will be done for their happiness by inuring them to provide for themselves, than could be done by dividing all your estates among them.” He later advised, “I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I travelled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer.”
In 1776, the year the ideological ancestors of today’s American Patriots were codifying our natural right to Liberty, Historian Edward Gibbon published his six-volume treatise, “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” detailing how opulence and entitlement led to the loss of civic virtue and the fall of the world’s first great republic.
Another enlightened philosopher of the era, François-Marie Arouet (Voltaire), observed, “The art of government consists of taking as much money as possible from one party of citizens to give to the other.”
In his 1781 “Notes on the State of Virginia,” Thomas Jefferson wrote, “Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.” He warned, “The mobs of the great cities add just so much to the support of pure government as sores do to the strength of the human body. It is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a republic in vigor. A degeneracy in these is a canker which soon eats to the heart of its laws and constitution.”
These 18th-century observations about the culture of entitlement served as seminal reference points for the “Fatal Cycle of Democracy” published a century later.
That cycle follows this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to Liberty (Rule of Law); From Liberty to abundance; From abundance to complacency; From complacency to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage (rule of men).
Thus, not only is the substance of Romney’s assertion about Obama’s “base,” tragically and completely accurate, it has been substantiated throughout history. And, according to The Heritage Foundation’s 2012 Index of Dependence on Government, Obama’s earnest endeavor of “fundamentally transforming the United States of America” is well underway, with historic numbers of Americans now dependent upon the state.
While it would be patently wrong to assert that everyone who receives a government subsidy and pays no taxes is an Obama supporter, the growing number of Americans who depend on government support under Obama’s Great Recession is staggering.
According to the Tax Policy Center, more than 46 percent of households pay no income tax. That is because over the last four decades, Congress has “engineered” the tax code to exempt income from targeted voter blocks.
The Census Bureau reports that almost 50 percent of Americans in the most recent quarter of record resided in a household where a family member received direct government assistance, at a cost of almost 70 percent of the federal budget. During the Reagan years, only 30 percent of households received government support, and the percentage has increased almost 10 percent since Obama took office.
About 16 percent of American households (one in seven) depend on food stamps – and the rolls of that systemic poverty indicator have swelled from 31.9 million when Obama took office, to a record 46.5 million people today. And when Obama gutted Welfare reform, that shuffled millions of voters into his camp.
Of course, most Americans who receive Medicare and Social Security have been forced to pay into those non-existent “trust funds” for their whole careers. Thus, to call that support an “entitlement” would be entirely wrong.
Responding to Romney’s exposure of the relationship between Obama’s socialist agenda and his electoral support, Barack endeavored to distance himself from his “redistributive justice” platform and instead enlisted his minions to kill the messenger.
House Democrat Whip Steny Hoyer claimed, “I don’t know that any Democrat believes redistribution of wealth is the end of government – it is not.”
Apparently Hoyer does not recall candidate Obama’s own words on the subject: “There has been a systematic, uh, uh, I don’t think it is too strong to call it a propaganda campaign, uh, against the possibility of government action and its efficacy. … As we try to resuscitate this notion that we are all in this together … the trick is figuring out how do we structure government systems that actually pool resources and hence facilitate redistribution, because I actually believe in redistribution.”
Meanwhile, Obama’s VP Joe Biden, in a speech to the ultra-Leftist Center for American Progress Action Fund, said that Romney and Ryan “are gonna put y'all back in chains!” But what Obama’s state-dependent lemmings don’t understand is that they’ve already been lured into chattel slavery chains of by their narcissistic master.
Obama and his ideological Marxists overtook the once-noble Democrat Party and converted it to the Socialist Democrat Party. (It has now moved far to the Left of where it was when Obama departed in 2017, failing to leave the state in the hands of his heir apparent, Hillary Clinton.)
The consequences have been devastating for those he ostensibly served, particularly for his most loyal constituency – black Americans, 93 percent of whom blindly voted for Obama.
The primary protagonist of the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King proclaimed famously, “I have a dream that my children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
But Democrats have done nothing to advance that proclamation. Instead, their party, founded by slave-owner Andrew Jackson, promotes statist policies which have enslaved mostly poor black folks on urban poverty plantations for generations – more than were ever enslaved on Democrat agricultural plantations – and they are dying equally violent deaths.
The Democrats maintain this most loyal constituency by propagating race-bait rhetoric in order to maintain their “victim status,” while keeping them trapped on those plantations. Democrats, and the black supremacy movement they have spawned, ensures black Americans are judged by the color of their skin rather than the content of their character – the antithesis of MLK’s dream. Frederick Douglas, Booker Washington and Martin King broadly condemned the race hustlers.
(Ironically, Obama, who has stoked the fires of racial hatred for his entire political career, is the direct maternal descendant of slave owners. (Oops.) Hard to erase that history, but references to Obama’s family ties to slavery are sparse because, again, that doesn’t fit neatly with the Left’s race-bait political narrative.)
Democrats were, are, and will continue to be the party of black oppression. Arguably, the Socialist Democrat Party is now, simultaneously, the author and beneficiary of generations of Americans ensnared and enslaved by the institutionalized “systemic racism” they have created over the last century.
Of leftist race hustlers and their profiteers, Thomas Sowell, senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, observed: “Many successful political careers have been built on giving blacks ‘favors’ that look good on the surface but do lasting damage in the long run. One of these ‘favors’ was the welfare state. A vastly expanded welfare state in the 1960s destroyed the black family, which had survived centuries of slavery and generations of racial oppression.”
To reiterate: The most consequential “systemic racism” in America is the institutionalization of Democrat social policies, which have enslaved poor black citizens on Demo-controlled Urban Poverty Plantations for generations. The Democrat Party platform has, by design, kept poor people in bondage to the welfare state and consequently, is the most enduring monument to racial exploitation in America.