http://conservativewatchnews.org/?page_id=2398
Admin: November 7, 2009
THIS IS A MUST READ, AMERICA!
Updated: July 22, 2011
You’ve heard former Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel say, “…never let a crisis go to waste.” You’ve heard from Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and other say how much of the “Sal Alinsky” model “Rules for Radicals” lawmakers and government officials are following. You’ve heard how Van Jones was an admitted Communist, before he was appointed (and later resigned) as “Green Czar” under Barack Obama. Cass Sunstein even wants to “tweek” or “nudge” our Constitution bit by bit. After you read this article, you may begin to connect the dots in your understanding. Health care ‘REFORM’ is just part of a literal ‘POWER GRAB‘ TO CREATE A SOCIALIST STATE!
All of this leads us to think about a last minute statement made on one of Glenn Beck’s shows: “…look up “Cloward & Piven.”
Well, folks, we took him up on it and here is what we found on http://Cloward-Piven.com,
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.
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If
you have made it this far, you may begin to understand how and why the
Obama Administration is functioning as it is and how the radical
advisory surrounding the administration is affecting major agenda issues
and decisions. Listen carefully to some of the ways Obama makes his
statements. Sometimes, they appear legit. But, once in a while, you’ll
see through the lies and deception. There is a “hidden agenda.” You may
even think, they are, in a stealth manner, bringing in socialism and
ultimately communism, not to mention the possibility of having a
dictatorship.
We pray to the Lord God our Creator that this does not happen to our great nation, the United States of America.
