THE ECONOMIC PLAN TO DESTORY AMERICA: THE CLOWARD-PIVEN STRATEGY, PART I

The Cloward-Piven Strategy, Part I

By Jim Simpson

Liberals self-righteously wrap themselves in the mantle of public spirit. They ardently promote policies promising to deliver the poor and oppressed from their latest misery - policies which can only find solution in the halls of government. But no matter what issue one examines, over the last fifty plus years, the liberal prescription has almost always been a failure.

Why is this so? Why does virtually every liberal scheme result in ever-increasing public spending while conditions seem to get continually worse? There are a number of reasons:

1. The programs usually create adverse incentives. This is especially true in so-called "anti-poverty" programs. The beneficiaries find government subsidies a replacement for, rather than a supplement to, gainful employment and eventually become incapable of supporting themselves. This in turn creates a dependent culture with its attendant toxic behaviors which demand still more government "remedies."
2. The programs create their own industry, complete with scads of "think tanks" and "experts" who survive on government research grants. These are the aptly named "Beltway Bandits."
3. They create their own bureaucracies, whose managers conspire with interested members of Congress to continually increase program funding, regardless of merit.
4. Members of Congress secure votes and campaign donations by extorting them from beneficiaries of such programs, either through veiled threats - "vote for me or those mean Republicans will wipe out your benefits" - or promises of still more bennies.

In short, all develop a vested interest in the program's survival. But if the result is always more and more government, of government, by government, and for government, with no solution in sight, then why do liberals always see government as the solution rather than the problem?

Similarly, liberals use government to promote legislation that imposes mandates on the private sector to provide further benefits for selected groups. But the results are even more disastrous. For example, weighing the laws or stacking the courts to favor unions may provide short term security or higher pay for unionized labor, but has ultimately resulted in the collapse of entire domestic industries.

Another example is health care. The Dems are always trying to impose backdoor socialized medicine with incremental legislation. Why do you suppose American healthcare is in such crisis? Answer: the government has already become too deeply involved. For example, many hospitals are closing their doors because they are overwhelmed with the burden of caring for indigent patients, illegal immigrants and vagrants who must, by law, be admitted like everyone else, despite the fact that they cannot pay for services. Read about it here -Destroying Our Health Care. The net result is reduced availability of care for everyone, exactly the opposite of what liberals claim to want.

To further complicate things, liberal jurists and lawyers have created new theories of liability that utilize the legal system as a means to further redistribute income. This too, has resulted in higher costs and prices in affected industries, higher insurance costs, or in some cases, complete elimination of products or services.

Liberals' endless pursuit of "rights" for different groups also does little but create increasing divisions in our society. Liberal policy pits old against young, men against women, ethnic and racial groups against one another, even American citizens against illegal aliens, all in the name of "equality." The only result is anger, tension and equal misery for all.

How does any of this improve our lot?

Finally, when companies relocate overseas to avoid the high cost of unionized labor and heavy domestic regulation, liberals sarcastically excoriate them for "outsourcing" America. Yet, when it comes to certain domestic industries, liberals in Congress suddenly become free marketers and choose to buy from overseas contractors rather than domestic suppliers. This happened most recently with a huge military contract being outrageously awarded to the heavily subsidized European consortium, AIRBUS, over America's own Boeing. Since liberals claim to be so determined to "save the American worker," what gives?

You have to take a step further back and ask some fundamental questions. Why is the liberal public policy record one of such unmitigated disaster? I mean, even the worst batter hits one occasionally. No one bats zero. No one that is, except liberals.

Prior to the Republican takeover in Congress in 1994, Democrats had over fifty years of virtually unbroken power in Congress with substantial majorities most of the time. With all the time and money in the world - trillions spent - they couldn't fix a single thing, not one. Today's liberal has the same complaints, and the same old tired solutions. Can a group of smart people, studying issue after issue for years on end, with virtually unlimited resources at their command, not come up with a single policy that works? Why are they chronically incapable?

Why?

When things go bad all the time, despite the best efforts of all involved, I suggest to you something else is at work - something deeper, more malevolent.

I submit to you that it is not a mistake, the failure is deliberate!

There is a method to the madness, and the method even has a name: the Cloward-Piven Strategy. It was first elucidated in the 1960s by a pair of radical leftist Columbia University professors, Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. Former radical-turned-conservative, David Horowitz, describes it thusly:

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.

[Part II of this article will explore those organizations created to implement the Cloward-Piven strategy and their direct ties to Barack Obama and his presidential candidacy.]

By James Simpson Email: one.wonders@verizon.net Click here for bio and archived articles

Read the article again Posted On: 03/28/09 08:30:38 PM Age 56, MD To the person who doubts that program failures are deliberate, I say read the article again and then read the other articles in the series. There are many reasons these policies fail. But the left has a second, covert agenda in pursuing these programs and policies despite their constant failure. And the agenda has been articulated both by Cloward and Piven and on a broader scale, the Frankfurt acolytes. Also, it is incorrect to say that most people who receive welfare are working poor. That is absolutely false. Prior to the 1996 reforms, now abolished thanks to Obama, over 90 percent of welfare recipients were long-term unemployed, years, decades, generations. I saw the statistic once, I believe it was 94 percent. Finally, if by asserting our system "requires" poor people, you are referring to the capitalist, market system, you are wrong again. No system of government has EVER produced such broadbased affluence for its people. Examine closely the socialist systems in the world today and you will discover that our poor live better than the middle classes in those countries, in terms of material wealth. Cloward-Piven Flow Chart - All Arrows Lead to Obama Posted On: 03/12/09 12:00:20 AM Age 59, TX Go to the following and scroll down to the flow chart created by the article's author James Simpson: www.americanthinker.com/2008/09/barack_obama_and_the_strategy.html Interesting. It had been posted Posted On: 03/11/09 12:19:20 AM Age 43, IL Mr. Simpson had posted this info before the election. He published it on Sept 28, 2008 in a piece entitled "Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis" in the American Thinker. http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/09/barack_obama_and_the_strategy.html Bookmark it. Learn it. Teach it. Use it to show the failings of Secular Humanism and share the Strategy of the King, the Gospel, with our Liberal cohabitants. At LAST-someone who supports my father's position Posted On: 03/10/09 11:20:39 PM Age 49, IL My dad's been saying this for three decades. He and mom taught us the Khrushchev warning, too. I'm gratified to learn he wasn't as dumb as I thought he was during my teen years. Whew. So now what? How do you convince the young people to put a stop to this? If it took two decades for me to be convinced...After all, it was so far-fetched...At least the majority of my classmates were from educated farm families in spite of what the liberal teacher was trying to shove at them...and I still had trouble not believing the teacher.(Although we were kicked off the school grounds in 1975 for our Christian Campus Fellowship meetings so we should have figured something was up)... How does one overcome this for today's kids, especially now that they're planning to increase the school day and school year? Might I suggest teaching them a new vocabulary word? Kleptocracy. economic destruction Posted On: 03/10/09 12:40:04 PM Age 40, OK that is terrifying!! I have always heard about how great FDR was...except from my grandparents. They hated him! In 'saving' our country and "helping the economy", he sent the soliers to slaughter animals and burn fields. My grandpa was in a family of 10 children. Someone decided this huge family had too many fields for crops so some were burned. This same someone decided they had too many animals, so they were killed and then burned so the family could not salvage any of the meat. Never saw that in a history book, and I have a BA in history! I guess that is what we can expect from our modern-day FDR...BHO. dig deeper Posted On: 03/10/09 12:13:58 PM Age 30, USA The author makes a good point about self-serving/sustaining government programs. I would say we should be critical and vigilant across the board, from programs that seem to depend on maintaining poverty, as he described, to unending military actions that create their own sets of experts, policy lobby, and dependents waiting for a handout. I would however challenge the assumption that these programs are meant to fail by design, rather than acknowledging that the programs are necessary because of other systemic problems. It doesn't fit with the stereotypes offered in the article, but most of the people who depend on some type of social welfare, work full-time jobs (full-time jobs that do not pay a living wage). Without addressing the real decline in American workers' wages, of course these programs will remain, and they will seem to fail. In this article (and the others in the series), it sounds like the author wants to let us off the hook for living in and justifying a system that needs poor people. Regarding the two gay guys Posted On: 03/10/09 10:20:17 AM Age 58, AR Sorry Lou, I don't think it would've made a difference to the liberals even if they did know Obama's strategy. I have suspected this deliberate action Posted On: 03/10/09 09:50:30 AM Age 60, NJ Since way back when Nikita Khrushchev said he would bury us, I have had a raised awareness of financial actions in America that are counter-productive to our way of life. You see, when others are so horribly jealous of what we have, there are unlimited people who would like to see our downfall. On several trips to the form USSR, I saw and heard first hand how badly others want not just what we have, but to take it away from us. It is the "dog in the manger" syndrome. The silly people on Capitol Hill get hypnotized into thinking they are invincible. When they become bought and paid for by outside interests, the bad guys go for the kill. That is when, "we the people" suffer big losses. Free American citizens need to support organizations like yours FRC, Focus on the Family, and the others who are fighting for us. Get doing something positive today, even if it is making phone calls or writing letters, it matters! Economic destruction Posted On: 03/10/09 08:21:12 AM Age 62, MO The economic problems in the U.S. are not a liberal versus conservative thing. They are not a Democrat versus Republican thing. They ARE a criminal government versus its citizens thing. For well over a century, there has been bipartisan support for a fraudulent monetary system. In 1919, John Maynard Keynes, a homosexual, communist, and economic adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, wrote in his book, "The Economic Consequences of Peace": “Lenin is to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch the currency…By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of its citizens…As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates widely from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless.” Keynes’ economic theories of deficit spending, which were to be financed by borrowing against future taxes, are still practiced by the United States government today. Congresses since that time have surely been aware of the dangers of deficit spending, but have chosen to do nothing about it; and it hasn’t mattered whether the majority in Congress were Republicans or Democrats. As a matter of fact, on June 10, 1932, Louis T. McFadden, who for more than ten years had served as chairman of the banking and currency committee in the House, said: “We have in this country one of the most corrupt institutions the world has ever known. I refer to the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Reserve Banks…Some people think the Federal Reserve Banks are United States government institutions. They are not. They are private credit monopolies which prey upon the people of the United States for the benefit of themselves and their foreign customers…The Federal Reserve Banks are the agents of foreign central banks…In that dark crew of financial pirates, there are those who would cut a man’s throat to get a dollar out of his pocket…Every effort has been made by the Federal Reserve Board to conceal its powers, but the truth is the FED has usurped the government. It controls everything here in Congress and controls all our foreign relations. It makes and breaks governments at will.” The people of the United States are being forced to support a corrupt government at the point of a gun! George Cancilla One race Posted On: 03/10/09 08:19:27 AM Age 60, AR Mr. Simpson, I agree with your article with the exception of one comment. In your article state that the liberals are pitting ethnic and racial groups against one another. I agree with Ken Ham that there is only one race, Homo Sapien. We may have different ethnic backgrounds but we are all members of the same race. Thank you for your incitefull article and God Bless. George