Cloward - Piven Acorn
White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel's comment "never pass up a
chance to use a good crisis" isn't original with him. Creating a
welfare crisis that demands emergency solutions is a political strategy
that's been effectively used for years, and actually has a name: the
Cloward-Piven strategy, named after two Columbia University
sociologists.
http://cloward-piven.com/
from discoverthenetwork.com
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.
http://asteria.fivecolleges.edu/findaids/sophiasmith/mnsss52_bioghist.html
Welfare crisis strategy is nothing new
http://www.southtownstar.com/news/eaton/1655823,070809eatoncol.article
In 1966, Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven wrote an
article advocating a flood of the nation's welfare system to increase
demand, to ultimately break its back and head the system into financial
chaos. Cloward and Piven's plan was activated effectively when the
nation realized the devastated state of New York City's welfare system
in 1995. Their efforts were acknowledged by their presence as President
Clinton signed the 1996 welfare reform into law.
Sadly, Clinton's then-radical system reform led to more dependency
on the state. Now, middle-income families with children, retired and
senior citizens, the mentally and emotionally disabled, as well as the
underemployed, turn to the state for assistance and panic when budget
cuts affecting their services are mentioned.
The Cloward-Piven crisis strategy is at work again, this time in
Illinois, with the help of the Service Employees International Union.
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