Obama is a follower of the Cloward Piven Strategy
* Strategy for forcing political change through
orchestrated crisis
Part
4 It advocates for rights to illegal aliens, pressing for no
barriers
to free movement of ‘immigrants’ across the border, as well as the
extension of welfare to these ‘immigrants’. 1 Cloward Piven
Strategy -
First proposed in 1966 and named after Columbia University sociologists
Richard Andrew Cloward and his wife Frances Fox Piven (today Piven is
an honorary chair for the Democratic Socialists of America), the
“Cloward-Piven Strategy” seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by
overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible
demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.
Inspired by the August 1965 riots in the black district of Watts in
Los Angeles (which erupted after police had used batons to subdue a
black man suspected of drunk driving), Cloward and Piven published an
article titled "The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty" in
the May 2, 1966 issue of The Nation. Following its publication, The
Nation sold an unprecedented 30,000 reprints. Activists were abuzz over
the so-called "crisis strategy" or "Cloward-Piven Strategy," as it came
to be called. Many were eager to put it into effect.
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 1972
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.
The authors noted that the number of Americans subsisting on
welfare -- about 8 million, at the time -- probably represented less
than half the number who were technically eligible for full benefits.
They proposed a "massive drive to recruit the poor onto the welfare
rolls." Cloward and Piven calculated that persuading even a
fraction
of potential welfare recipients to demand their entitlements would
bankrupt the system. The result, they predicted, would be "a profound
financial and political crisis" that would unleash "powerful forces …
for major economic reform at the national level."
Their article called for "cadres of aggressive organizers" to use
"demonstrations to create a climate of militancy." Intimidated by
threats of black violence, politicians would appeal to the federal
government for help. Carefully orchestrated media campaigns, carried
out by friendly, leftwing journalists, would float the idea of "a
federal program of income redistribution," in the form of a guaranteed
living income for all -- working and non-working people alike. Local
officials would clutch at this idea like drowning men to a lifeline.
They would apply pressure on Washington to implement it. With every
major city erupting into chaos, Washington would have to act.
This was an example of what are commonly called Trojan Horse
movements -- mass movements whose outward purpose seems to be providing
material help to the downtrodden, but whose real objective is to draft
poor people into service as revolutionary foot soldiers; to mobilize
poor people en masse to overwhelm government agencies with a flood of
demands beyond the capacity of those agencies to meet. The flood of
demands was calculated to break the budget, jam the bureaucratic gears
into gridlock, and bring the system crashing down. Fear, turmoil,
violence and economic collapse would accompany such a breakdown --
providing perfect conditions for fostering radical change. That was the
theory.
Cloward and Piven recruited a militant black organizer named George
Wiley to lead their new movement. In the summer of 1967, Wiley founded
the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO). His tactics closely
followed the recommendations set out in Cloward and Piven's article.
His followers invaded welfare offices across the United States -- often
violently -- bullying social workers and loudly demanding every penny
to which the law "entitled" them. By 1969, NWRO claimed a dues-paying
membership of 22,500 families, with 523 chapters across the nation.
Regarding Wiley's tactics, The New York Times commented on
September 27, 1970, "There have been sit-ins in legislative chambers,
including a United States Senate committee hearing, mass demonstrations
of several thousand welfare recipients, school boycotts, picket lines,
mounted police, tear gas, arrests - and, on occasion, rock-throwing,
smashed glass doors, overturned desks, scattered papers and ripped-out
phones."These methods proved effective. "The flooding succeeded beyond
Wiley's wildest dreams," writes Sol Stern in the City Journal.
"From
1965 to 1974, the number of households on welfare soared from 4.3
million to 10.8 million, despite mostly flush economic times. By the
early 1970s, one person was on the welfare rolls in New York City for
every two working in the city's private economy."As a direct result of
its massive welfare spending, New York City was forced to declare
bankruptcy in 1975. The entire state of New York nearly went down with
it. The Cloward-Piven strategy had proved its effectiveness.
The Cloward-Piven strategy depended on surprise. Once society
recovered from the initial shock, the backlash began. New York's
welfare crisis horrified America, giving rise to a reform movement
which culminated in "the end of welfare as we know it" -- the 1996
Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which
imposed time limits on federal welfare, along with strict eligibility
and work requirements. Both Cloward and Piven attended the White House
signing of the bill as guests of President Clinton.
Most Americans to this day have never heard of Cloward and Piven.
But New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani attempted to expose them in
the late 1990s. As his drive for welfare reform gained momentum,
Giuliani accused the militant scholars by name, citing their 1966
manifesto as evidence that they had engaged in deliberate economic
sabotage. "This wasn't an accident," Giuliani charged in a July 20,
1998 speech. "It wasn't an atmospheric thing, it wasn't supernatural.
This is the result of policies and programs designed to have the
maximum number of people get on welfare."
Cloward and Piven never again revealed their intentions as candidly
as they had in their 1966 article. Even so, their activism in
subsequent years continued to rely on the tactic of overloading the
system. When the public caught on to their welfare scheme, Cloward and
Piven simply moved on, applying pressure to other sectors of the
bureaucracy, wherever they detected weakness.
In 1982, partisans of the Cloward-Piven strategy founded a new
"voting rights movement," which purported to take up the unfinished
work of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Like ACORN, the organization
that spear-headed this campaign, the new "voting rights" movement was
led by veterans of George Wiley's welfare rights crusade. Its flagship
organizations were Project Vote and Human SERVE, both founded in 1982.
Project Vote is an ACORN front group, launched by former NWRO organizer
and ACORN co-founder Zach Polett. Human SERVE was founded by Richard A.
Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, along with a former NWRO organizer named
Hulbert James.
All three of these organizations -- ACORN, Project Vote and Human
SERVE -- set to work lobbying energetically for the so-called
Motor-Voter law, which Bill Clinton ultimately signed in 1993. The
Motor-Voter bill is largely responsible for swamping the voter rolls
with "dead wood" -- invalid registrations signed in the name of
deceased, ineligible or non-existent people -- thus opening the door to
the unprecedented levels of voter fraud and "voter
disenfranchisement"
claims that followed in subsequent elections. At the White House
signing ceremony for the Motor Voer bill, both Richard Cloward and
Frances Fox Piven were in attendance.
The new "voting rights" coalition combines mass voter registration
drives -- typically featuring high levels of fraud -- with systematic
intimidation of election officials in the form of frivolous lawsuits,
unfounded charges of "racism" and "disenfranchisement," and "direct
action" (street protests, violent or otherwise). Just as they swamped
America's welfare offices in the 1960s, Cloward-Piven devotees now seek
to overwhelm the nation's understaffed and poorly policed electoral
system. Their tactics set the stage for the Florida recount crisis of
2000, and have introduced a level of fear, tension and foreboding to
U.S. elections previously encountered mainly in Third World countries.
In January 2010, journalist John Fund reported that Congressman
Barney Frank and U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer were preparing to unveil
legislation calling for "universal voter registration," whereby any
person whose name was on any federal roll at all -- be it a list of
welfare recipients, food stamp recipients, unemployment compensation
recipients, licensed drivers, convicted felons, property owners, etc.
-- would automatically be registered to vote in political elections.
Without corresponding identity-verification measures at polling places,
such a law would vastly expand the pool of eligible voters, thereby
multiplying the opportunities for fraudulent voters to cast ballots
under other people's names.
Both the Living Wage and Voting Rights movements depend heavily on
financial support from George Soros's Open Society Institute and his
"Shadow Party," through whose support the Cloward-Piven strategy
continues to provide a blueprint for some of the Left's most ambitious
campaigns to overload, and cause the collapse of, various American
institutions. Leftists such as Barack Obama euphemistically refer to
this collapse as a "fundamental transformation," on the theory that
society can only be improved by destroying the deeply flawed existing
order and replacing it with what they view as a better alternative.