Just WHY does it seem that Democrats are always pointing out that the world is coming to an end? I mean, if Republicans point out that 95% of the US is doing rather well, the Democrats immediately focus on the 5% that is managing badly.

(And, before I get any hysterical comments about the financial situations of the last few weeks, my comment applies to the general norm).

Well, here's someone who has analyzed the WHY, and concluded that it is deliberate policy. It's the CLOWARD-PIVEN STRATEGY. What is that?

In their 1966 article, Cloward and Piven charged that the ruling classes used welfare to weaken the poor; that by providing a social safety net, the rich doused the fires of rebellion. Poor people can advance only when "the rest of society is afraid of them," Cloward told The New York Times on September 27, 1970. Rather than placating the poor with government hand-outs, wrote Cloward and Piven, activists should work to sabotage and destroy the welfare system; the collapse of the welfare state would ignite a political and financial crisis that would rock the nation; poor people would rise in revolt; only then would "the rest of society" accept their demands.

The key to sparking this rebellion would be to expose the inadequacy of the welfare state. Cloward-Piven's early promoters cited radical organizer Saul Alinsky as their inspiration. "Make the enemy live up to their (sic) own book of rules," Alinsky wrote in his 1989 book Rules for Radicals. When pressed to honor every word of every law and statute, every Judaeo-Christian moral tenet, and every implicit promise of the liberal social contract, human agencies inevitably fall short. The system's failure to "live up" to its rule book can then be used to discredit it altogether, and to replace the capitalist "rule book" with a socialist one.

I hadn't heard of Cloward before, but, when I attended a REALLY liberal college in a public university, I spent money on books for classes by Frances Fox Piven. The underlying ideology wasn't explicitly expressed, at least as far as I know. It was more a method of exposing the proles to radical ideas, without directly saying that radicalism was what was intended to occur.

Do I think my professors were duplicitous? Well, you could certainly argue that, with an underlying plan to radicalize the masses, they weren't totally upfront about their aims. On the other hand, they took great care to make sure that I (and the other students) were exposed to the range of Western thought. In all, I had a first-class education, heavy on writing and critical thought. Can't complain, however Marxist- or Alinksy-tinged it was.

From the American Thinker article:

No matter where the strategy is implemented, it shares the following features:

1. The offensive organizes previously unorganized groups eligible for government benefits but not currently receiving all they can. [Community Organizing]
2. The offensive seeks to identify new beneficiaries and/or create new benefits. [Welfare Rights, Housing Rights, Health Insurance Rights, et al]
3. The overarching aim is always to impose new stresses on target systems, with the ultimate goal of forcing their collapse.

That last is what worries me. I've long been suspicious about the timing of the financials markets. With uber-financier George Soros behind the scenes, it's possible that a little push here, a little shove there, and - kaboom! - the whole thing can collapse. It just takes dedication and LOTS of money.

Which Soros has.