NObama wants FORCED national Service!!!!!

[IEATV8S]

Shades of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy!!!

"That’s why as President, I will expand AmeriCorps to 250,000 slots, and make that increased service a vehicle to meet national goals like providing health care and education, saving our planet and restoring our standing in the world, so that citizens see their efforts connected to a common purpose. People of all ages, stations, and skills will be asked to serve. Because when it comes to the challenges we face, the American people are not the problem – they are the answer."

"We cannot continue to rely only on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we've set. We've got to have a civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded. "

He does think he is the Messiah, the WORLD'S SAVIOR, instead of the President of the United States!


The Volokh Conspiracy - Funding Barack Obama's "civilian national security force."--

[SFITurbo]

No Reason to Celebrate: AmeriCorps Turns Five
(circa 1997)
by Derrick Max


Would you voluntarily donate your hard-earned money to a charitable organization that spends millions of dollars to send its high-level staff members to national conferences at places like Caesar's Palace? Would you voluntarily donate to an organization that paid stipends and gave scholarships to students for their work as baby sitters or as line workers at fast food restaurants? Would you donate to an organization that had failed, for the last five years, to maintain auditable financial statements? Of course you wouldn't. Unfortunately, you have no choice but to "donate" to such organizations through your federal taxes that are used to fund AmeriCorps--President Clinton's failed national service program.

The President and the First Lady celebrated your forced donation to this organization last Wednesday at the fifth anniversary party for the Corporation for National Service. This corporation oversees the paid-volunteer program known as AmeriCorps (is there such a thing as a "paid volunteer"?). Over the last five years, this bureaucracy (it's not really a corporation--despite its name) has distinguished itself more by its disservice to the nation's pocketbook than for its good deeds around the country. But facts, like a drunken uncle at the proverbial wedding reception, will be hidden by the President and the First Lady to keep them from marring the joyous celebration being planned for AmeriCorps' anniversary.

As the lead investigator for the Congressional Committee with oversight of AmeriCorps for three of the five years of this program, I was repeatedly astounded by the gross mismanagement uncovered in this ill-designed, if well-intentioned, program. Our investigation of AmeriCorps uncovered high costs ($26,000 per AmeriCorps participant), high dropout rates (almost 30 percent), questionable training (sex education, video presentation skills, diversity), poor accounting and management oversight (unauditable accounts), wasteful spending ($400,000 to the AFL-CIO for "training and technical assistance"), and questionable partisan political activities (raising money, handing out fliers, voter registration, etc.). Unfortunately, on the eve of its fifth anniversary, after spending over $3 billion in taxpayer money, matters at the President's pet program appear to have only gotten worse.

In June of this year, the Corporation for National Service sent 115 of its highest-paid employees and 27 consultants to a four day "community service conference" at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas. The corporation employees were joined by more than 760 employees of various grantees of the corporation. It is important to note that these grantees receive substantial taxpayer funds from the Corporation for National Service. In all, this "conference" is estimated to have cost taxpayers several million dollars.

What did taxpayers get in return for their hard-earned money spent on this Las Vegas junket? According to the agenda, conference participants heard scintillating discussions with titles like "Making Joyful Noises: Community Building through Humor and Song," and "Teaching Your Children Values Can Be Fun for the Whole Family." In light of the financial and management problems, which are rampant in AmeriCorps and its grantees, one would have expected to find classes on how to adequately manage taxpayer and donor money, "accounting for idiots," or "employee time cards made easy." Unfortunately, no such classes were on the agenda. While employees of the Corporation for National Service gallivant around the country at taxpayer expense, holding conferences on feel-good topics, taxpayer money continues to be abused.

A case in point is the AmeriCorps program in Terre Haute, Indiana. In June of this year, at about the same time AmeriCorps staff was living it up in Las Vegas, it was learned that two AmeriCorps programs operated at Ivy Tech State College in Terre Haute had been suspended. An audit of those programs showed that they had almost $300,000 in questionable costs. Shockingly, over half of these costs were attributable to the fact that no record was kept of any work being performed by AmeriCorps members. Two of the AmeriCorps members who lacked any record of their work, and who had received substantial stipends and scholarships, just happened to be related to the former director of the local AmeriCorps program. Can you spell nepotism?

The remainder of the questionable costs in the Terre Haute AmeriCorps program included service credit that AmeriCorps participants got for time spent on their jobs as baby sitters and lifeguards. Those AmeriCorps members were told that if their regular jobs paid less than $9,000, their work could be counted as "community service." Other members in these programs were receiving service credit for going to church or attending team practice for sports they played. This, they were told, benefited the community and thus could also be considered "community service." In short, AmeriCorps members were getting stipends and scholarships for doing what they had been doing before joining AmeriCorps--participating in school sports and working part time for minimum-wage salaries.

While the President and his political appointees at AmeriCorps would like us to believe that such problems are rare and isolated, that is simply not the case. The inspector general of AmeriCorps warned our committee in 1998 that reporting and record keeping was a high-risk area that made taxpayer funds susceptible to "errors of irregularities, including fraud, in the reporting of AmeriCorps service hours." In fact, the inspector general noted that almost half of all audited AmeriCorps grantees had errors in their reporting of member and staff hours. Thus, while the President likes to quote stratospheric statistics on the amount of good work being performed by AmeriCorps participants around the country, there is no way to adequately verify if this work has actually been performed or what that work actually entailed.

The President and the First Lady celebrate this glorious anniversary, surrounded by young men and women in AmeriCorps uniforms bearing heart-warming stories on how AmeriCorps has changed their lives, but don't be fooled. We need to make sure that this anniversary is AmeriCorps' last--before the drunken uncle embarrasses us all.

******

Derrick Max is director of government relations at the Cato Institute and the former lead investigator on the committee with congressional oversight responsibility for AmeriCorps.


Like I needed more places to piss my hard earned money away to.
I see the droves of citizens now marching lockstep to sign up for Obamacorps in their effort to save the U.S. with our tax dollars.

[salvageV6]

Well if it was forced military boot camp for 17/18 year olds and training them with automatic rifles and handguns I would be all for it.

Doesn't look like it has much to do with "national security" at all.

OH THE SHAME!!!!

"The Obama youth", I bet they get trained in how to turn in their neighbors and parents, after all the govt. and the messiah know best.

[The Blob]

Originally Posted by SFITurbo

According to the agenda, conference participants heard scintillating discussions with titles like "Making Joyful Noises..."

You ought to hear the joyful noises Z makes after a good meal.

[No Tie]

How stupid can the obama supporters be.It must be strong kool-aid.I hope
the idiots put down the crack pipe/weed /ect. and WAKE-UP!

[wile87]

the more i read and hear, the more i'm convinced. my childrens futures are fu*cked, and so is this country!

[henschman]

wow, when i saw this thread, i figured it was an exaggeration or something, but nope... this is straight from Obama's own website.

Barack Obama | Change We Can Believe In | Service

As most fascists/totalitiarians do, he tries to hide the true nature of his policies behind euphamisms. He calls his policy "Universal Voluntary Public Service" -- wait, if something is universal, doesn't that kind of mean it's not voluntary? The top of the page says he wants to "Enable All Americans to Serve to Meet the Nation's Challenges." Um, I thought everybody already can volunteer for a non-profit or something in a free country if they want to. Am I missing something? You see what he's really getting at if you read further... He wants to force all middle school, high school, and college students to do a certain number of hours of national service every year, presumably in one of his many new service programs. Well, to be fair, he apparently only wants to force middle schoolers and high schoolers to work -- he just wants to buy off college kids by paying ALL of them $40 an hour to do "volunteer" work (yeah, that'll really give them the spirit of service, lol). However, it does say "Require 100 hours of service in College," so I'm not sure how voluntary he really wants it to be. There are a lot of other crazy things on that web page... for instance, it says that Obama believes that Bush didn't take advantage of the disaster of 9/11 enough, because he should have used it as an opportunity to implement these kinds of service programs.

the page also frequently mentions the fact that there are less and less people donating and volunteering to nonprofits ("not enough R&D in the nonprofit sector" -- what does that even mean?), and he says we need government intervention to get more people to do so. That kind of misses the point! Government intervention is precisely the reason people are less charitable nowadays! before this country was such a welfare state, we had a much higher amount of voluntary charitable giving. The reason there is less of it today is because the government already takes so much of people's money (especially the ones with lots of disposeable income, that would probably be doing the most giving), and already purports to take responsibility for poor people. people think that their tax money is alredy helping the disadvantaged and that they have "fulfilled their civic duty." of course, those programs are horribly inefficient and ineffective, and privately-donated money would have had a much greater effect toward actually reducing poverty -- charities are actually held accountable by their donors, and they have to compete with other charities for donation dollars.

Here's a question for you guys... if George Bush had pushed a program for forced national service in all the nation's schools and created a "homeland security corps" that was just as large and powerful as the military on a domestic level, do you think the Democrats would have let him get away with it? hell no, they'd be calling him a fascist and everything else. Just goes to show you how most people will scream bloody murder when the guys on the other side of the aisle are abusing our liberty, but when their own people do it... not a peep.

[salvageV6]

" Here's a question for you guys... if George Bush had pushed a program for forced national service in all the nation's schools and created a "homeland security corps" that was just as large and powerful as the military on a domestic level, do you think the Democrats would have let him get away with it? hell no, they'd be calling him a fascist and everything else. Just goes to show you how most people will scream bloody murder when the guys on the other side of the aisle are abusing our liberty, but when their own people do it... not a peep. "

Well DUH!!!

That's why we call them lying lefty hippocritters.

[henschman]

i wasn't just talking about the lefties. lots of republicans supported things when bush pushed them that they would have fillibustered against till kingdom come if clinton had tried them. there are very few principled people in politics anymore... its all a big power struggle between the two parties.

[IEATV8S]

Originally Posted by henschman

i wasn't just talking about the lefties. lots of republicans supported things when bush pushed them that they would have fillibustered against till kingdom come if clinton had tried them. there are very few principled people in politics anymore... its all a big power struggle between the two parties.

Except this time, as YOU have now seen and read, the SOCIALISTS don't hide their agenda's anymore! Instead it's name is changed to liberalism, and they have a Congress full of supporters called Democrats.