Cloward-Piven Government

Correction: I attributed a quote in this article to Barney Frank that "the middle class will be too distracted to fight." That was an error. Barney Frank never made that statement. The correct quote was “You don’t have to be worried about what the Middle Class is going to do. Things are so bad they have to put food on the table, get clothes on their kids, get them to school..." The statement was made in hearings with Obama economic advisor Robert Reich, where Reich proposed that stimulus dollars not go to "high skilled people who are already professionals or to white male construction workers..." but to low income groups. Rangel wanted assurances that would happen and asked if it could not be set up to happen automatically. So the dollars would not necessarily go where they could be put to most productive use, but to those groups who comprise a large part of the Democrat base. I apologize for the error. The quote has been removed.



Cloward Piven Government

Casualties mount in Afghanistan as we fight an increasingly brazen Taliban, while President Obama continues to ignore the pleas of our military commanders for more troops. At the same time, he parties with Obama fundraiser and supporter Jodie Evans, the terrorist-sympathizing co-founder of Code Pink, who just returned from Afghanistan after a visit with the Taliban. She brought him a package of materials. Was she acting as conduit for the Taliban, like Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin, who brought a letter to Obama from the Palestinian terrorist group, Hamas?

A lone Muslim terrorist guns down 13 American service members and wounds forty others in the worst domestic terrorist attack since 9-11 and the President of the United States says we shouldn’t “jump to conclusions.” The Director of Homeland Security meanwhile, directs her attention to reassuring Muslims that there won’t be a “backlash” while utterly ignoring her responsibility to protect this nation, and the Army Chief of Staff considers these killings a cost of achieving “diversity” he is willing to pay.

When Attorney General Eric Holder announced last week that the government would try admitted 9-11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a NY civilian court, constitutional scholars, defense analysts, intelligence experts and many citizens were stunned. The precedents and possibilities are horrifying. In the same breath Holder refused to provide names of Justice Department lawyers facing potential conflicts of interest who formerly worked in Holder’s law firm on behalf of Guantanamo terrorist detainees.

When the brave and clever initiative of two twenty-something kids demonstrate the community organization ACORN’s degenerate, corrupt nature, we watch the spectacle of ACORN suing these kids while law enforcement stands idly by. Meanwhile the Democrat-controlled Congress removes federal funding for ACORN in the about-to-expire continuing resolution, but tries to sneak it back in new legislation.

Saturday Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid bought off support of two “wavering” Democrat Senators to achieve cloture on the Senate’s massive, unread and unanalyzed, 2,074 page version of healthcare legislation that expanded upon the Senate Finance Committee bill, also passed out of committee without substantive review. This will compete with the House’s massive, unanalyzed and unread 1,990 page health bill, passed with a five vote margin on November 7th. And while everyone was focused on health legislation, backdoor censorship passed under the misnamed “Hate Crimes” bill. Incapable of passing as a standalone, the Dems tacked it onto defense authorization legislation.

Meanwhile, Senator Barbara Boxer’s economy crushing global warming tax bill moved out of her Environment and Public Works committee on November 5 after she violated committee rules by holding a vote with no Republicans present. While all the news outlets are now pronouncing “Cap and Trade” dead until next year, the New York Times reports there is already another plan in the works. Look for a surprise vote in December.

The media rejoiced at positive third quarter 2009 GDP growth – entirely fueled by the temporary “Cash for Clunkers” and first-time homebuyer credit programs – but at the same time, unemployment raced past 10 percent. With many unemployed leaving the labor force entirely, the true rate may be actually closer to 20%.

The “Stimulus” plan has proven a complete failure in creating promised private sector jobs. The only jobs it has created are in the public sector, and a lot of these are fraudulent. Many of us knew this would happen. Indeed, despite the administration’s claim that “most economists” agreed with the stimulus plan, the truth is that most did not. One well-known economist dubbed it “Mugabe Economics.”

Despite this, Democrats in Congress and the White House are discussing a second stimulus bill, adding yet more billions to what is already the highest deficit in post WW II history – at 11% of GDP, almost twice the previous record – while President Obama observes without irony that “people could lose confidence in the U.S. economy in a way that could actually lead to a double-dip recession…” if we keep on piling up federal debt. All this is reported without comment by the mass media.

A million or more people gathered at the Washington, DC Mall on September 12, 2009. Many of these people were middle-aged or elderly. For most this was the first public demonstration they had ever attended. It was an unprecedented spontaneous outpouring of concern over this President and Congress’s reckless policies, expressed by people who one year ago didn’t know each other, had never heard of “community organizing” and had no need to. While Democrat “paid volunteer” SEIU union thugs roved town hall meetings over the summer beating up protesters, the President’s allies dismiss the 9/12 gathering as “Astroturf.”

We stand aghast at these and other astonishing statements, delivered offhandedly by the leader of the free world or his proxies, as we collectively reel from the successive body blows his initiatives are delivering to our economy and morale. We marvel at the appointment of “czars” each more radical than the next, whose unspeakable agendas are ignored by the press.

Entrepreneurs and businesses sit on their hands, not because there is no business opportunity, but because they, like practically everyone else in this country, are increasingly uncertain about our future. With anxiety bordering on sickness, we ask ourselves “what on earth is going on?”

It is time to cast aside all remaining doubt.

In September of last year, American Thinker published Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis. Part of a series, it connected then presidential candidate Barack Obama to individuals and organizations practicing a malevolent strategy for sabotaging our society. Since then the story of that strategy has found its way across the blogosphere, onto the airwaves of radio stations across the country, the Glenn Beck television show, Bill O’Reilly and now Mark Levin.

The methodology is known as the Cloward-Piven Strategy, and we can all be grateful to David Horowitz and his Discover the Networks for originally exposing and explaining it to us. He describes it as:

The strategy of forcing political change through orchestrated crisis. 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.

Richard Cloward and Frances Piven were husband and wife, two lifelong members of Democratic Socialists of America and taught sociology at Columbia University (Piven later went on to City University of New York). In a May, 1966 Nation magazine article titled “The Weight of the Poor,” they outlined their strategy, proposing to use grassroots radical organizations to push ever more strident demands for public services at all levels of government.

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."

They implemented the Strategy by creating a succession of radical organizations but most notably the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), with the help of veteran organizer Wade Rathke. Their crowning achievement was the “Motor Voter” act, signed into law by Bill Clinton in 1993 with Cloward and Piven standing behind him (shown on the left, Cloward in grey, piven in green).

As we now know, ACORN was one of the chief drivers of high-risk mortgage lending that eventually led to the financial crisis. But the Motor Voter law was another component of the strategy. It created vast opportunities for fraud in our electoral system which ACORN then exploited.

ACORN’s vote registration scandals throughout the U.S. are predictable fallout.

The Motor Voter law also opened another vulnerability in the system: the registration of vast numbers of illegal aliens, who then vote reliably Democrat. Herein lies the real reason Democrats are so anxious for open borders, security be damned.

It should be clear to anyone with a mind and two eyes that this president and this Congress do not have our interests at heart. They are implementing this strategy on an unprecedented scale by flooding America with a tidal wave of poisonous initiatives, orders, regulations and laws. As Obama advisor Rahm Emmanuel said, “A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.”

The real goal of “healthcare” legislation, the real goal of “cap and trade,” the real goal of “stimulus” is to rip the guts out of our private economy and transfer wide swaths of it over to government control. Do not be deluded by the propaganda. These initiatives are vehicles for change. They are not goals in and of themselves, except in their ability to deliver power, and will make matters much worse, for that is their design.

This time, in addition to overwhelming the government with demands for services, Obama and the Democrats are overwhelming political opposition to their plans with a flood of apocalyptic legislation. Their ultimate goal is to leave us so discouraged, demoralized and exhausted that we throw our hands up in defeat.

It is time acknowledge that these people are our enemies. They don’t use guns, yet, but they are just as dangerous, determined and duplicitous as the communists we faced in the Cold War, Korea, Vietnam and bush wars across the globe, and the Nazis we faced in World War II.

It is high time we overcome the denial, and fully digest and internalize this fact, with all its ugly ramifications. These people are stealing this country while we stand and watch. They have violated countless laws, and could be prosecuted, had we the political power. Not only are their policies unconstitutional, but deliberately so – the goal being to make the Constitution irrelevant, we could make them live up to their oath of office, had we the political power. Their spending is off the charts and will drive us into hyperinflation, but could be rescinded, had we the political power. These policies are toxic, but could be stopped and reversed, had we the political power. Their ideologies are poisonous, but could be exposed for what they are, with long jail sentences as an object lesson, had we the political power.

Every single citizen who cares about this country should be spending every minute of his/her spare time lobbying, organizing, writing and planning. Fight every initiative they launch. It is all destructive. If we are to root out this evil, it is critical that in 2010 we win competent, principled leaders willing to defend our constitution and our country. Otherwise the malevolent cabal that occupies the seat of government today will become too entrenched.

After that all bets are off.

Businessman and Examiner.com columnist Jim Simpson is a former White House staff economist and budget analyst. His writings have been published in American Thinker, Washington Times, WorldNet Daily, FrontPage Magazine, DefenseWatch, Soldier of Fortune and others.