NEWS and ISSUES - Cloward-Piven Strategy

Cloward and Piven - Violence ok " ... as long as it is a BIG part of your strategy'

Francis Piven

Cloward and Piven - Violence ok

 

It's okay to use violence if it's part of a strategy.

Obama Alinsky Connection

By Vincent Gioia | Published  10/19/2008         The importance of this election to all Americans and the future of our country cannot be overstated. The United States has never had the possibility of a virtual Marxist in the oval office before. 

 

        The Democrat Party has been taken over by the extreme left wing to the extent that earlier Democrats like Harry Truman, John Kennedy, and Hubert Humphrey would not recognize it. 

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        It is fair to ask how we have gotten to the point where a charismatic Marxist is within walking distance to the White House.  The answer is that a perfect storm of socialism has been developed by shrewd people behind the scene, a leftist news media, and careful long-term planning.  All major players are acolytes of communist Saul Alinsky who taught his students the ''Rules for Radicals'' to take over the country by working from within.

        Saul Alinsky wrote two books where he described his organizational principles and strategies: ''Reveille for Radicals'' (1946) and ''Rules for Radicals'' (1971).  ''Rules for Radicals'' begins with a quote about Lucifer, written by Saul Alinsky: “Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical: from all our legends, mythology, and history (and who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins--or which is which), the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom--Lucifer.”

        In ''Rules for Radicals,'' Alinsky wrote: “Here I propose to present an arrangement of certain facts and general concepts of change, a step toward a science of revolution”; building on the tactical principles of Machiavelli: “The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals are written for the Have-nots on how to take it away.”

        Alinsky’s Rules are concerned with the acquisition of power: “my aim here is to suggest how to organize for power: how to get it and how to use it.”  This is not to be done with assistance to the poor, or even by organizing the poor to demand assistance: “Even if all the low-income parts of our population were organized ... it would not be powerful enough to get significant, basic, needed changes.”

        Alinsky advises the organizer to target the middle class, rather than the poor: “Organization for action will now and in the decade ahead center upon America’s white middle class.  That is where the power is.”

        Clearly Alinsky is interested in the middle class only because it is useful: “Our rebels have contemptuously rejected the values and the way of life of the middle class.  They have stigmatized it as materialistic, decadent, bourgeois, degenerate, imperialistic, war-mongering, brutalized, and corrupt. They are right; but we must begin from where we are if we are to build power for change and the power and the people are in the middle class majority.”

        Does this sound familiar? Obama is calling for “change” but the change Obama seeks is right out of the Alinsky Rule book.

        In his Rules for Radicals Alinsky defends belief that the end justifies the means: “to say that corrupt the ends, is to believe in the immaculate conception of ends and principles ... the practical revolutionary will understand ... [that] in action, one does not always enjoy the luxury of a decision that is consistent both with one’s individual conscience and the good of mankind.”

        Altogether, Alinsky provides eleven rules of the ethics of means and ends.  They are morally relativistic; the main one is that the Rules for Radicals “are therefore concerned with how to win.  In such a conflict, neither protagonist is concerned with any value except victory. … “The third rule of the ethics of means and ends is that in war the ends justifies almost any means.”

        “There can be no such thing as a successful traitor, for if one succeeds, he becomes a founding father.”

        Rules for Radicals teach the organizer that he must give a moral appearance (as opposed to behaving morally): “All effective action requires the passport of morality.”

        The tenth rule of the ethics of means and ends states “that you do what you can with what you have and clothe it with moral arguments ... Moral rationalization is indispensable at all times of action whether to justify the selection or the use of ends or means.”

        ''Rules for Radicals'' provide the organizer with a strategy for community organization that assumes an adversarial relationship between groups of people in which one either dominates or is dominated.

        “The first rule of power tactics is: power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.”

        “Wherever possible go outside the experience of the enemy.  Here you want to cause confusion, fear, and retreat.”

        “Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules. You can kill them with this. They can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.”

        “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.  It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule.  Also, it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage.”

        “The threat is generally more terrifying than the thing itself.”

        “In a fight almost anything goes.  It almost reaches the point where you stop to apologize if a chance blow lands above the belt.”

        “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.  One of the criteria for picking the target is the target’s vulnerability ... the other important point in the choosing of a target is that it must be a personification, not something general and abstract.  The enemy properly goaded and guided in his reaction will be your major strength.”

        ''Rules for Radicals'' stresses organizational power-collecting: “The ego of the organizer is stronger and more monumental than the ego of the leader.  The organizer is in a true sense reaching for the highest level for which a man can reach--to create, to be a ‘great creator,’ to play God.”

        Alinsky thought Hillary Clinton was a terrific “organizer” and wanted her to become his protégé.  She and Bill Clinton have employed Alinsky’s tactics probably better than anyone else, until Barack Obama came along.

        Obama has followed Alinsky’s Rules perfectly.  Although Alinsky was an atheist, Alinsky recognized the importance of church communities as springboards for agitation and for demanding goods and services. Obama undertook his agitating work in Chicago's South Side poor neighborhoods but he was not yet a church goer although he did have an office in a church.  The people he intended to organize were church people who were serious church-goers.  Many people asked where he went to church.  He evaded the question for a while but then decided to join a church.

        Of course, the selection of a church to join was important.  He decided to join a huge Black nationalist church with a pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who openly preached “black" gospel.  Rolling Stone Magazine had a story on Obama and his church, entitled, "Destiny's Child," which included this excerpt from one of Rev. Wright's sermons (from an article by Kyle-Anne Schiver in American Thinker):

        "Fact number one: We've got more black men in prison than there are in college," he intones.  Fact number two: Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run!"

        "We are deeply involved in the importing of drugs, the exporting of guns, and the training of professional KILLERS. . . . We believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God. . . . We conducted radiation experiments on our own people. . . . We care nothing about human life if the ends justify the means!  And. And. And! GAWD! Has GOT! To be SICK! OF THIS S**T!"

        Obama has called Reverend Wright his spiritual mentor and still claims he is his sounding board.

        Among some of the Black Nationalist signs hanging in this church are a list of admonishments to black solidarity, called the "Black Value System," and a sort of moral code calling for the "Disavowal of the Pursuit of Middleclass ness."

        This doesn't sound like the Ten Commandments to me nor does this seem like any church I am familiar with.

        Let’s see how Obama follows Alinsky’s Rules to defeat John McCain and win the election.

        Barack Obama mocks John McCain, while urging his followers to "get in their face," these are tactics right out of Saul Alinsky's playbook: ridicule and agitation.

        During a Las Vegas rally Obama joked about McCain for what he described as lauding about "how as chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, he had oversight of every part of the economy."

        "Well, all I can say to Sen. McCain is, 'Nice job. Nice job,'" Obama said sarcastically; "Where is he getting these lines?  It's like a 'Saturday Night Live' routine."

        Alinsky advised community organizers like Obama to "laugh at the enemy" to provoke "irrational anger." "Ridicule," he said, "is man's most potent weapon.  It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage."

        Obama speaks in a quiet voice and almost always wears a business suit.  Both are also borrowed from Alinsky's Rules. "Don't scare" the middle class.  Instead, look like them, talk like them, act like them.”

        Alinsky taught his followers to work for radical change from the inside. Obama said in his first memoir "like a spy behind enemy lines."  He wrote it before entering politics, while still working with Alinsky groups and training street agitators known as "community organizers" for ACORN.  In 1983 Obama wrote that he became a community organizer in ACORN because of "The need for change. Change in the White House, where Reagan and his minions were carrying on their dirty deeds."

        Here are some other examples of how well Obama follows the Alinsky Rules (from a Yahoo News article).

        Rule: "Rub raw the resentments of the people; search out controversy and issues." In the mortgage meltdown, for instance, Obama vows to prosecute "predatory lenders" for "abusing" minority borrowers.  He's also stoking class resentment by painting Wall Street and other executives as villains.

        Rule: "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it."  In an ad to woo Hispanic voters, Obama demonized Rush Limbaugh by falsely claiming he made racist statements against immigrants.

        Rule: "A mass impression can be lasting and intimidating." This explains why Obama moved his acceptance speech to a football stadium and bussed in 85,000 supporters.  Alinsky's son was so impressed, he praised Obama for learning his father's "lesson well."

        Rule: "Multiple issues mean constant action and life" for the cause.  This is why Obama never harps on one issue, as Hillary did with health care.  His platform is packed with grievances from "economic justice" to "reproductive justice" to "environmental justice."

        Obama is following almost perfectly the outline for socialist revolution written by the founder of community organizing, Saul Alinsky.

        Not that Obama is altogether home free, but he uses his war room effectively.

        After Sarah Palin ridiculed Obama’s community organizing in one speech, Obama surrogates quickly claimed Palin was bringing up the phrase as a racist code for "black."

        Mention of “Community Organizing” is not racism, but racism is a code word used by communists. McCain should make that point instead of legitimizing such radicalism, as he did recently when he said, "I respect community organizers; and Senator Obama's record there is outstanding"--which contradicted Sarah Palin in another example of the incompetent McCain campaign.

        Alinsky could never have dreamed a disciple would be in a battle for the most powerful job in the world, let along have a good chance of winning.  Nor would I have believed so many Americans would fall for the socialist claptrap of Barack Obama.

Vincent Gioia

Vincent Gioia is a retired patent attorney living in Palm Desert, California.  He blogs at www.vincentgioia.com and receives e-mail at gioia@gte.net.  

View all blogs by Vincent Gioia...

Obama, Alinsky, and the Marxist Left

What is a "Cloward - Piven Strategy"

STRATEGY FOR FORCING POLITICAL CHANGE
THROUGH ORCHESTRATED CRISIS

First proposed in 1966 and named after Columbia University sociologists Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, 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.

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 "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."

Cloward-Piven's early promoters cited radical organizer Saul Alinsky as their inspiration.

They predicted as a result "a profound financial and political crisis" that would unleash "powerful forces … for major economic reform at the national level."

Read article at "Discoverthenetworks"

Francis Fox Piven

Frances Fox Piven

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Frances Fox Piven, born in Calgary, Alberta, Canada in 1932, is Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Sociology at The Graduate Center, City University of New York.

 

She earned her PhD from the University of Chicago in 1962. In 2006-2007 she served as the President of the American Sociological Association. She was married to her long-time collaborator Richard Cloward until his death in 2001. Together with Cloward, she designed the "Cloward-Piven Strategy," outlined in an article written in the may 1966 issue of The Nation entitled "The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty."