POVERTY IS WHERE THE MONEY IS
By
Betty Freauf
November 24, 2010
NewsWithViews.com
On March 16, 1964, President Lyndon Baines Johnson sent a special message to Congress asking for a Declaration of War on Poverty – His Great Society. As generally happens when government gets involved, the results are malfeasance, allegations of corruption and coddling delinquents in the Job Corps program and in 1965 Congress gave its blessing to this unconstitutional nightmare called Medicaid. Like the recent Obamacare legislation that passed without anyone reading it and without anyone knowing who drafted it, the Medicaid pilot program was created?
The State of Oregon has the Oregon Health Plan that is the state’s version of Medicaid. Like the silly Californians who voted for a man who had already served two terms as Democrat governor, silly Oregon voters voted a third term for a Democrat by the name of John Kitzhaber, a former emergency room doctor who helped create the Oregon Health Plan. He had earlier served two terms and then waited for eight years in the wings. Now that his failed programs during his first two terms have caused Oregon to be in bad financial shape with high unemployment and relying on federal stimulus money to keep the state afloat, he plans to solve the problem during a third term.
A May 30, 2010 article said both gubernatorial candidates for governor were pledging changes to fight budget shortfalls. Medicaid relies on federal money. Although Oregon has budgeted $6.1 billion in the current two-year cycle for Medicaid, which is in the Oregon Health Plan, $4.2 billion of it is federal funds. A newspaper article dated August 2, 2010 said Oregon was patiently waiting on the Feds for stimulus money.
Shirley Scheibla, a gifted reporter in the field of finance, economics and labor, in her 1968 book Poverty Is Where The Money Is learned early in researching her book that the War on Poverty was important and dangerous – important because of the money and hopes involved, dangerous because tax-supported poverty warriors follow the Communist pattern of organizing cadres of the poor to form a potent political and indeed revolutionary force. And that is coming to Oregon when those that have been dependent on unconstitutional entitlement programs find they are being cut because the Public Employment Retirement System has also been mismanagement and now finds itself in financial trouble.
Broad in scope, rich in detail, the book carries the reader through the entire program, starting from its conception in the minds of socialistically oriented ideologues. The book revealed how the War on Poverty’s Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) really got started with money the Congress had intended for other agencies. It describes how the OEO, to sell itself to the Congress, the poor and general public, launched one of the most masterful propaganda campaigns this country has ever seen. As a result, “the nation plunged pell mell into a crash program to carry out untried and revolutionary ideas without adequate consideration or even preliminary testing on a small scale.”
She writes about the highly touted Job Corps, a plausible-sounding program to give vocational training and basic education to disadvantage youth and what a shattering failure it became. The reader learns with mounting anger how the OEO yawned when it came to finding work for Job Corps youths – then issues in adequate, even falsified information about its efforts. Mrs. Scheibla piles up examples of bureaucratic extravagance: $1 million for Job Corpsmen to fly home for Christmas while servicemen had to pay their own way and were indeed being “bumped” to make way for the corpsmen, $370,000 for brass-buttoned jackets for 17,000 corpsmen – at a time when the Army had a uniform shortage.
The book’s most harrowing pages expose the Community Action programs. She documents how anti-poverty funds were used to subsidize community organizers to harangue mobs and incite to riot. “Federal anti-poverty money went to pay exorbitant salaries to Community Action employees, some with criminal, leftist and even Communist backgrounds.”
The book’s author tells how the U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) announced it was assigning Miss Wendy Goeple of Lowndes County, Alabama, to coordinate a pilot “Medicaid” program that was to be used as a pattern for similar programs throughout the U.S. between 1967 and 1975. Wendy was a 27-year old Stanford University graduate who had established a background of 10 years of pro-Communist activity, which included:
(1) Attended Communist world Youth Festival at Helsinki, Finland
(2) Member of the Dubois Club…identified by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover as a youth project of the Communist Party
(3) Served as a lieutenant and strike organizer for Cesar Chavez, National Farm Workers Association (NFWA). Saul Alinsky trained Chavez as revolutionary. Alinsky billed himself as a ‘professional radical’ dedicated to radical change in our society.
Miss Goepel’s background in the NFWA lended emphasis to the ‘colonizing’ of radical groups in the Black Belt, while in the pay of OEO.
Almost one in five in the Job Corps thought they were worse off after they’d been recruited because 59% of them already had employment or were going to school before entering the Corps. Because enrollment was low, the Director spent much of his time traveling to recruit Job Corps graduates. The program had no system for checking up on what happened to the students after they left the center and there were no follow ups.
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The scandals ranged from misspending of federal funds, cost overruns, lawsuits, stabbings, liquor, narcotics, sex, pregnant girls and other forms of violence at Job Corps centers largely the result of a poorly prepared program launched on a crash basis for political gain. In our Tillamook, Oregon Bureau of Land Management Center, Scheibla writes a sex deviate – a transvestite - caused problems and had to be isolated from other corpsmen while members of the center staff counseled the youth and was given psychiatric treatments. When other corpsmen learned of his characteristic, they became upset and general bedlam reigned at the center until he was discharged and committed to an institution in New Jersey.
Businesses who were hiring the young folks were finding they were not adequately trained in the career in which they were hired and lacked motivation to learn or lacked proficiency. Many didn’t even know how to sign their names nor could they write basic English and had no concept of how to properly apply for a job.
This is how Medicaid became a reality and we saw during the New Orleans flooding what a failure the Job Corps had been so can we rely on all the other programs President Barack Obama is promising such as free college tuition for kids who go to college and then will be offered work for the government. The results will probably be very expensive but very successful because good-paying jobs with many benefits is where many people are going these days. They’ll all be so grateful to the president, they’ll continue voting Democrat.
A young physician by the name of Dr. Starner Jones is pictured on an e-mail which someone sent me many months ago. His short letter to the White House accurately puts the blame on a “Culture Crisis” instead of a “Health Care Crisis.” Dr. Jones writes:
“During my shift in the Emergency Room last night, I had the pleasure of evaluating a patient whose smile revealed an expensive shiny gold tooth, whose body was adorned with a wide assortment of elaborate and costly tattoos, who wore a very expensive brand of tennis shoes and who chatted on a new cellular telephone equipped with a popular R&B ring tone.
“While glancing over her patient chart, I happened to notice that her payer status was listed as ‘Medicaid’! During my examination of her, the patient informed me that she smokes more than one costly pack of cigarettes every day and somehow still has money to buy pretzels and beer.
“And, you and our Congress expect me to pay for this woman’s health care? I contend that our nation’s ‘health care crisis’ is not the result of a shortage of quality hospitals, doctors or nurses. Rather, it is the result of a ‘crisis of culture’, a culture in which it is perfectly acceptable to spend money on luxuries and vices while refusing to take care of one’s self or, heaven forbid, purchase health insurance. It is the culture based in the irresponsible credo that ‘I can do whatever I want to because someone else will always take care of me.’”
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“Once you fix this ‘culture crisis’ that rewards irresponsibility and dependency, you’ll be amazed at how quickly our nation’s health care difficulties will disappear.”
The April 2009 Pravda/Soviet News reported that America’s capitalism is gone with a whimper. Do they know something Americans don’t know? We can only pray God will grant us a reprieve so we can work our way out of this financial mess or has pride destroyed America?
� 2010 Betty Freauf - All Rights Reserved
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