Cloward-Piven

[calfoxwc]

.....toward a socialist/communist end.

 

Read it, think about it. See the similarites in what is going on with the radicals in the Congress and WH..

 

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Quote:

Cloward-Piven is a strategy for forcing political change through orchestrated crisis.

The strategy was first proposed in 1966 by Columbia University political scientists Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven as a plan to bankrupt the welfare system and produce radical change. Sometimes known as the "crisis strategy" or the the "flood-the-rolls, bankrupt-the-cities strategy," the Cloward-Piven approach called for swamping the welfare rolls with new applicants - more than the system could bear. It was hoped that the resulting economic collapse would lead to political turmoil and ultimately socialism.

The National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), founded by African-American militant George Alvin Wiley, put the Cloward-Piven strategy to work in the streets. Its activities led directly to the welfare crisis that bankrupted New York City in 1975.

Veterans of NWRO went on to found the Living Wage Movement and the Voting Rights Movement, both of which rely on the Cloward-Piven strategy and both of which are spear-headed by the radical cult ACORN.

Both the Living Wage and Voting Rights movements depend heavily on financial support from George Soros's Open Society Institute.

On August 11, 1965, the black district of Watts in Los Angeles exploded into violence, after police used batons to subdue a man suspected of drunk driving. Riots raged for six days, spilling over into other parts of the city, and leaving 34 dead. Two Columbia University sociologists, Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven were inspired by the riots to develop a new strategy for social change. In November 1965 - barely three months after the fires of Watts had subsided - Cloward and Piven began privately circulating copies of an article they had written called "Mobilizing the Poor: How it Could Be Done." Six months later (on May 2, 1966), it was published in The Nation, under the title, "The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty."

The article electrified the Left. Following its May 2, 1966 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.

Richard A. Cloward was then a professor of social work at Columbia University. He died in 2001. His co-author Frances Fox Piven was a research associate at Columbia's School of Social Work. She now holds a Distinguished Professorship of Political Science and Sociology at the City University of New York.

In their 1966 article, Cloward and Piven charged that the ruling classes used welfare to weaken the poor. By providing a social safety net, the rich doused the fires of rebellion. Cloward and Piven wanted to fan those flames. 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, 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. So wrote Cloward and Piven in 1966.

The key to sparking this rebellion would be to expose the inadequacy of the welfare state. This Cloward and Piven proposed to do, in classic Alinsky fashion, by forcing welfare bureaucrats to live up to their own book of rules.

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 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 "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.

The Cloward-Piven strategy never achieved its goal of system breakdown and a Marxist utopia. But it provided a blueprint for some of the Left's most destructive campaigns of the next three decades. It will likely haunt America for years to come since George Soros' Shadow Party has now adopted the strategy, honing it into a far more efficient weapon than any of its Sixties-era promoters could have foreseen.

Cloward and Piven recruited a militant black organizer named George Wiley to lead their new movement. For more information on Wiley and his welfare rights movement. In the summer of 1967, Wiley founded the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), with headquarters in Washington, DC. Wiley's tactics closely followed the recommendations set out in Cloward and Piven's article. His followers invaded welfare offices across the nation - 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 Manhattan Institute's City Journal. "From 1965 to 1974, the number of single-parent 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 reckless welfare spending, New York City - the financial capital of the world - was forced to declare bankruptcy in 1975. The entire state of New York nearly went down with it. Leftist agitators swooned in triumph. The Cloward-Piven strategy had proved its effectiveness.

The Backlash

The Cloward-Piven strategy depended on surprise. Once society recovered from the initial shock, the backlash began. New York's welfare crisis horrified the nation, 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 Mayor Rudolph Giuliani attempted to expose them in the late 1990's. As his drive for welfare reform heated up, 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 1997 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. They learned to cover their tracks. 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.

The Cloward-Piven strategy - first proposed in 1966 - 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. Application of this strategy contributed greatly to the turmoil of the late Sixties. Cloward-Piven failed to usher in socialism, but it succeeded in generating an economic crisis and in escalating the level of political violence in America - two cherished goals of hard-Left strategists.

Radical organizers today continue tinkering with variations on the Cloward-Piven theme, in the perennial hope of reproducing '60s-style chaos. The thuggish behavior of leftwing unions such as SEIU and of certain elements of George Soros' Shadow Party can be traced, in a direct line of descent, from the early practitioners of Cloward-Piven.

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 jot and tittle 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.

In its earliest form, the Cloward-Piven strategy applied Alinsky's principle to the specific area of welfare entitlements. It counseled activists to create what might be called Trojan Horse movements - mass movements whose outward purpose seemed to be providing material help to the downtrodden, but whose real purpose was to draft poor people into service as revolutionary foot soldiers.

The specific function of these Trojan Horse movements was 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, at least, was the theory behind the Cloward-Piven strategy.

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 widely blamed today 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.

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, bogus charges of "racism" and "disenfranchisement" and "direct action" (street protests, violent or otherwise). Just as they swamped America's welfare offices in the 1960s, the Cloward-Piven team now seeks to overwhelm the nation's understaffed and poorly policed electoral system. Their antics set the stage for the Florida recount crisis of 2000, and have introduced a level of fear, tension and foreboding to U.S. elections heretofore encountered mainly in Third World countries. For more information on the Voting Rights Movement, see the entry for "Project Vote."

Both the Living Wage and Voting Rights movements depend heavily on financial support from George Soros's Open Society Institute. It is largely thanks to money from Soros that the Cloward-Piven strategy continues even now to eat away at America's political and economic infrastructure.

[calfoxwc]

<H1 id=firstHeading class=firstHeading>Cloward–Piven strategy</H1><H3 id=siteSub>From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia</H3>The Cloward–Piven strategy is a political strategy outlined by Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, then both sociologists and political activists at the Columbia University School of Social Work, in a 1966 article in The Nation entitled "The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty." The two argued that many Americans who were eligible for welfare were not receiving benefits, and that a welfare enrollment drive would create a political crisis that would force U.S. politicians, particularly the Democratic Party, to enact legislation "establishing a guaranteed national income."^[1]The strategy

 

Cloward and Piven’s article is focused on forcing the Democratic Party, which in 1966 controlled the presidency and both houses of the United States Congress, to take federal action to help the poor. They argued that full enrollment of those eligible for welfare “would produce bureaucratic disruption in welfare agencies and fiscal disruption in local and state governments” that would “deepen existing divisions among elements in the big-city Democratic coalition: the remaining white middle class, the white working-class ethnic groups and the growing minority poor. To avoid a further weakening of that historic coalition, a national Democratic administration would be constrained to advance a federal solution to poverty that would override local welfare failures, local class and racial conflicts and local revenue dilemmas.”^[2] They wrote:

 

The ultimate objective of this strategy—to wipe out poverty by establishing a guaranteed annual income—will be questioned by some. Because the ideal of individual social and economic mobility has deep roots, even activists seem reluctant to call for national programs to eliminate poverty by the outright redlstribution of income.

[3]

 

Focus on Democrats

The authors pinned their hopes on creating disruption within the Democratic Party. "Conservative Republicans are always ready to declaim the evils of public welfare, and they would probably be the first to raise a hue and cry. But deeper and politically more telling conflicts would take place within the Democratic coalition," they wrote. "Whites – both working class ethnic groups and many in the middle class – would be aroused against the ghetto poor, while liberal groups, which until recently have been comforted by the notion that the poor are few... would probably support the movement. Group conflict, spelling political crisis for the local party apparatus, would thus become acute as welfare rolls mounted and the strains on local budgets became more severe.”^[4]

 

Michael Reisch and Janice Andrews wrote that Cloward and Piven "proposed to create a crisis in the current welfare system – by exploiting the gap between welfare law and practice – that would ultimately bring about its collapse and replace it with a system of guaranteed annual income. They hoped to accomplish this end by informing the poor of their rights to welfare assistance, encouraging them to apply for benefits and, in effect, overloading an already overburdened bureaucracy."^[5]

 

 

Reception

Historian Robert E. Weir argues that the original goal of the strategy was to bring about a crisis in the welfare system that would require radical reforms.^[6] A major article in the New York Times in 1970 investigated the welfare system and discussed the impact of the Cloward–Piven strategy.^[7]Howard Phillips, chairman of the Conservative Caucus, was quoted in 1982 as saying that the strategy could be effective because "Great Society programs 'had created a vast army of full-time liberal activists whose salaries are paid from the taxes of conservative working people.".^[8]Robert Chandler claimed, "The socialist test case for using society's poor and disadvantaged people as sacrificial “shock troops,” in accordance with the Cloward–Piven strategy, was demonstrated in 1975, when new prospective welfare recipients flooded New York City with payment demands, which may have contributed to the bankrupting of the state government."^[9] Other observers credit the city's bankruptcy to the mismanagement caused by politics, encouraging "frequently maturing short-term debt that left officials constantly scrambling to pay off loans"^[10]

 

 

References

1. <LI id=cite_note-0>

^ Cloward, Richard; Piven, Frances (May 2, 1966). "The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty". New York: The Nation. p. 512. <LI id=cite_note-1>^ Cloward and Piven, p. 510 <LI id=cite_note-2>^ Cloward and Piven, p. 510 <LI id=cite_note-3>^ Cloward and Piven, p. 516 <LI id=cite_note-4>^ Reisch, Michael; Janice Andrews (2001). The Road Not Taken. Brunner Routledge. pp. 144–146. ISBN 1-58391-025-5. http://books.google.com/books?id=f0iC56biZOgC&pg=PA145&lpg=PA145&dq=cloward+piven+crisis+strategy&source=web&ots=FS1gpmnk4K&sig=6u84VMirF97Qjb0x4lb6PYZNxgo&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=10&ct=result. <LI id=cite_note-5>^ Weir, Robert (2007). Class in America. Greenwood Press. pp. 616. ISBN 978-0-313-33719-2. http://books.google.com/books?id=YS69fMlIUX0C&pg=PA616&dq=%22cloward-piven+strategy%22&client=firefox-a. <LI id=cite_note-NYTWelfare-6>^ Richard Rogin (1970-09-27). "Now It's Welfare Lib". New York Times. p. SM16. <LI id=cite_note-NYT-7>^ Robert Pear (1984-04-15). "Drive to Sign Up Poor for Voting Meets Resistance". New York Times. <LI id=cite_note-Chandler-8>^ Chandler, Richard, "The Cloward–Piven strategy", The Washington Times, October 15, 2008. ^ http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/05/nyregion/recalling-new-york-at-the-brink-of-bankruptcy.htmlRetrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloward%E2%80%93Piven_strategy"

[calfoxwc]

Waiting for a response from Sev or Heck.... waiting for

 

"haha that can't be true, haha"

 

The truth is in the news, all over the place, and in

 

the actions of the left in Congress and the WH.

 

We're in big, big trouble.

[Mr. T]

Waiting for a response from Sev or Heck.... waiting for

 

.

 

 

They are in recess for easter break, emails and marching orders will be sent to them soon.

 

You may find heck on a busload of those who oppose tea parties throwing eggs.

[calfoxwc]

Still? Progessives on the board have no comment?

 

Afraid of speaking on the subject?

 

Can't deny it? don't want to admit it?

 

It's real, and it certainly looks like exactly what is

 

happening right now.

 

"pulleeze, make Cal make it go away !"

 

Most Americans are now understanding that all of Obama's

 

violations of his previous promises... has a huge ulterior motive.

 

Cloward-Piven. Read up about it.

[calfoxwc]

Reckon the libs can't handle the truth.

 

Ignoring the truth isn't going to help anything.

 

Cloward-Piven.

 

We are in a sub-cultural, destructive takeover

 

of ... us and our country, our way of life, our economy,

 

our freedoms....

 

Truth is, libs can't manufacture ANY kind of rebuttal to

 

what is really going on.

[Mr. T]

They dont have time to respond, they are at their Acorn Move On Rallies this weekend.

 

 

[Mr. T]

Cloward-Piven sound like heck's cup of tea, or is that coffee?

[VaporTrail]

Chill. I've read what you've presented, and I find it really interesting, but the most objective data I've been able to find on it is wikipedia's article, which you've already posted. The rest of the results are from pages with a right-wing agenda, at first glance, anyways. It's better to be thought an idiot, than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt. If and when I know more about this, I'll let you know how I feel; but when all I see are people that are claiming it's going to be the "end of capitalism," I'm going to have a very hard time taking them seriously.

[Mr. T]

It is funny how liberals will ignore the facts. Just because it is not presented on CNN or MSNBC they wont believe that radicals have taken over in many aspects of how politicians can get elected. How many times have we heard of community organizations and unions voting in blocks to get their man in office.

 

And as we speak there are many Acorn workers who have been indicted for voter fraud during the 2008 elections.

 

Oh say it aint so, make it go away says vt and heck.

[calfoxwc]

Maybe Heck hath no comment.

 

Can't spell "Cloward-Piven" ???

 

Or, is ignoring, because he doesn't

 

want to deny ALL of reality ?

[tjs7]

Waiting for a response from Sev or Heck.... waiting for

 

"haha that can't be true, haha"

 

The truth is in the news, all over the place, and in

 

the actions of the left in Congress and the WH.

 

We're in big, big trouble.

 

I've read about this strategy. I don't doubt that it is used by some groups. But where is the evidence that this is used as part of some massive conspiracy by the current Congress and the WH?

 

From the text above, this strategy was supposed to overload government systems, with the ultimate goal of socialism. I don't see how this worked as advertised. If anything, this strategy underlines the resiliency of the US system of government; the flaws pointed out by overloading the system led to MORE restrictive welfare rules (the 1996 "end to welfare as we know it"), not a breakdown of the system and subsequent socialism.

[calfoxwc]

That's an excellent reply - it's just that the trends of incredulous overspending,

 

and the contradictory deletion of 500 billion from Medicare, and the addition of 30 million

 

customers TO medicare, and the bringing ? on board of illegal aliens into hc and welfare...

 

and the threatening cap n trade...

 

Cloward-Piven is more a possible explanation for what is really going on.

 

Because right now, a lot of what is going on, makes not a bit of sense.

[tjs7]

That's an excellent reply - it's just that the trends of incredulous overspending,

 

and the contradictory deletion of 500 billion from Medicare, and the addition of 30 million

 

customers TO medicare, and the bringing ? on board of illegal aliens into hc and welfare...

 

and the threatening cap n trade...

 

Cloward-Piven is more a possible explanation for what is really going on.

 

Because right now, a lot of what is going on, makes not a bit of sense.

 

You are correct that the 30 million newly covered will either be covered by Medicaid, or will be partially covered by subsidies. And part of this money will come from 500 billion in cuts to Medicare. I see this as fiscally responsible. If this were Cloward-Piven in action, I would expect that the 30 million would have been covered without corresponding cuts somewhere else in the govt.

 

I am not 100% sure, but I think cap and trade has been shelved for now. I think a much more stripped down energy bill is now being considered. I think two things happened; 1. it was recognized that this may not be the best policy when we are just coming out of a severe recession and 2. this is probably not politically feasible even if some wanted to do it.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/26/science/.../26climate.html

 

http://www.cleveland.com/business/index.ss...conference.html

 

As for overspending, I agree that we need to address our debt. But I'm not sure we have gone out of control with our spending, if the extra stimulus money spent in 2009 and 2010 really does end up averting Great Depression II.

 

http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/downch...r=c&local=s

 

This graph shows that as a %of GDP, spending is largely constant from 1995-2008. IMO, the reason our debt is out of control is largely due to the two tax cuts passed in 2001 and 2003, as well as reduced revenues due to the worldwide financial crisis, shown in the graph below. We have been deficit spending from approximately 2000-present.

 

http://www.usgovernmentrevenue.com/downcha...r=c&local=s

 

The only way I see us dealing with the debt is some combination of two things; either letting tax cuts expire in a few years to maintain current levels of spending, or cutting somewhere. The only logical place where we can actually achieve some savings would be in some military reduction. I say this because Medicare and Social Security disbursements are currently completely paid for by FICA taxes, and other services in the budget don't even compare with our defense spending.

[calfoxwc]

tjs7 -

 

That's excellent food for thought. I can't even argue with you !

 

dammit. LOL