Saturday, September 3, 2011

Right-wing commentator: Poor people voting is ‘un-American’

by Muriel Kane

Many conservatives appear to think badly of poor people, but Matthew Vadum of the Capital Research Center takes it a step further. According to the title of his latest article for American Thinker, he believes that "registering the poor to vote is un-American."

"Why are left-wing activist groups so keen on registering the poor to vote?" Vadum asks. "Because they know the poor can be counted on to vote themselves more benefits by electing redistributionist politicians. Welfare recipients are particularly open to demagoguery and bribery."

"Registering them to vote is like handing out burglary tools to criminals," he continues. "It is profoundly antisocial and un-American to empower the nonproductive segments of the population to destroy the country-- which is precisely why Barack Obama zealously supports registering welfare recipients to vote. ... Encouraging those who burden society to participate in elections isn't about helping the poor. It's about helping the poor to help themselves to others' money."


Vadum goes on to claim that "registering the unproductive to vote is an idea that was heavily promoted by the small-c communists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven" -- and if that assertion sounds suspiciously like the similar theories involving Cloward and Piven promoted by Glenn Beck, it is no coincidence.

Vadum describes himself in his Twitter profile as "Glenn Beck's tutor on the Left," and the description accompanying a video uploaded by Vadum to YouTube this July states, "Glenn Beck learned about the 'Cloward-Piven Strategy' of orchestrated crisis for the first time ever when he interviewed Matthew Vadum, an expert on left-wing pressure groups, on Fox News on May 13, 2009."

Two years ago, Raw Story reported on the agenda of the Capital Research Center, where Vadum is a senior editor, as being intended to "defund the left":

The idea of starving the Democratic Party of donations by defunding the progressive non-profits that form a central pillar of its support is not new. It goes back to at least 1981, when the Heritage Foundation published a set of over 2000 policy recommendations for the Reagan administration. ... The Capital Research Center (CRC) was founded in 1984 by a former Heritage Foundation vice president to implement this agenda by uncovering the presumably questionable funding sources of progressive groups.

"Currently, CRC senior editor Matthew Vadum -- who describes himself as 'America's foremost expert on the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN' -- seems to be carrying much of the weight of the anti-ACORN campaign through his blog, Twitter feed, and frequent appearances with Glenn Beck and other right-wing TV hosts.

"Last May, Vadum told Beck, 'ACORN is an immense crime family ... that has tentacles all though the United States, and now it's trying to spread to India and Canada and other places. ... They're engaged in racketeering. ... They break the law constantly.'

"'Something that needs to be explored is the roots of ACORN in the 1960s,' Vadum continued. 'It grew out of the radical welfare rights movement. And the idea behind that was that not enough people were on welfare and that you needed to pack the welfare rolls with as many people as possible in order to overwhelm the governments -- the various levels of government -- and cause social chaos.'"

Vadum's latest attack on the poor appears to be the natural extension of that same agenda. "Cloward and Piven's long campaign to bring vast numbers of unproductive people into the political process culminated in the 1993 enactment of the Motor-Voter law," he writes. "That law turned welfare offices into voter registration centers and encouraged nonprofit groups to conduct registration drives. It also opened the door to massive voter fraud. ... As Benjamin Franklin supposedly said, 'When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.' With the help of Cloward, Piven, Alinsky, and Obama, we're well on our way."

4 comments:

  1. So that means he does not want the poor to have voting rights, so what about the young and the college students? What is his thoughts of minorities? Also, where is the left media and blogs on exposing this yokel to the whole world and make him defend those extremist views in open public forums instead of just on right wing shows like Fox News and others. Ask the republican candidates if they support these views and if they unhesitatingly disavow them.

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  2. They disavow them because rule number one in politics is: Deny the truth for it will cost you votes but always maintain the fight to bring it to fruition behind the scenes. The people will believe whatever you tell them and those that don't, who needs 'em; the sleepers outnumber the awake a thousand fold.

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  3. I have to agree with you on all accounts there, but it is really not fair to the american people to allow their elected officials and representatives both from local, state and ederal leverls to get or atain that much power of them (us). It is high time we really do throw the bums out and replace them with people who mean what they say about community and family, not corporate interests and bottom line profits of common sense. I personally believe that God is getting fed up with what he is seeing on a daily basis and he is warning us to stop hurting his people and his world all in the name of money, greed and power.

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  4. Ah but that is the crux...some of these people claim to represent God...we are indeed in troubled times

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