Strategy for forcing political change through orchestrated
crisis
First proposed in 1966 and named after Columbia University sociologists Richard Andrew Cloward and his wife Frances Fox Piven (both longtime members of the Democratic Socialists
of America, where Piven today is an honorary chair), 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.
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Inspired by the August 1965 riots in the black district of
Watts in Los Angeles (which erupted after police had used batons to subdue a
black man suspected of drunk driving), Cloward and Piven published an article
titled "
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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.
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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 on September 27, 1970. 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.
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The key to sparking this rebellion would be to expose the
inadequacy of the welfare state. 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 1971 book Rules
for Radicals. When pressed to honor every word 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.
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 threats of 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 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.
This was an example of what are commonly called Trojan Horse
movements -- mass movements whose outward purpose seems to be providing
material help to the downtrodden, but whose real objective is to draft poor
people into service as revolutionary foot soldiers; 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 was the theory.
Cloward and Piven recruited a militant black organizer named
George Wiley to lead their new movement. The three met in January 1966, at a radical
organizers' meeting in Syracuse, New York called the "Poor People's War
Council on Poverty." Wiley listened to the Cloward-Piven plan with interest. That same month, he launched his own activist
group, the Poverty Rights Action Center, headquartered in Washington DC. In a
calculated show of militancy, he sported dashikis, jeans, battered shoes, and a
newly grown Afro. Regarding the Cloward-Piven strategy, Wiley told one
audience:
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"A]a lot of us have been hampered in our thinking
about the potential here by our own middle-class backgrounds - and I think most
activists basically come out of middle-class backgrounds - and were oriented
toward people having to work, and that we have to get as many people as
possible off the welfare rolls.... [However] I think that this [Cloward-Piven]
strategy is going to catch on and be very important in the time ahead."
After a series of mass marches and rallies by welfare
recipients in June 1966, Wiley declared "the birth of a movement" -
the Welfare Rights Movement.
Cloward and Piven publicly outlined their strategy at the
Second Annual Socialist Scholars Conference, held in September 1966 at New York
City's Hotel Commodore. To read an eyewitness account of their presentation,
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In the summer of 1967, Ralph Wiley founded the National Welfare
Rights Organization (NWRO). His tactics closely followed the recommendations
set out in Cloward and Piven's article. His followers invaded welfare offices
across the United States -- 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.
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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," wrote Sol Stern in the City Journal.
"From 1965 to 1974, the number of 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."
The National Welfare Rights Organization pushed for a
"guaranteed living income," as prescribed by Cloward and Piven, which
it defined, in 1968, as $5,500 per year for every American family with four
children. The following year the NWRO raised its demand to $6,500. Though Wiley
never made headway with his demand for a living income, the tens of billions of
dollars in welfare entitlements that he and his followers managed to squeeze
from state and local governments came very close to sinking the economy, just
as Cloward and Piven had predicted.
In their 1966 article, Cloward and Piven had given special
attention to New York City, whose masses of urban poor, leftist intelligentsia
and free-spending politicians rendered it uniquely vulnerable to the strategy they
proposed. At the time, NYC welfare agencies were paying about $20 million per
year in "special grants." Cloward and Piven estimated that they could
"multiply these expenditures tenfold or more," draining an additional
$180 million annually from the city coffers.
New York City's arch-liberal mayor John Lindsay, newly
elected in November 1966, capitulated to Wiley's every demand. An appeaser by
nature, Lindsay sought to calm racial tensions by taking "walking
tours" through Harlem,
Bedford Stuyvesant, and other troubled areas of the city.
This made for good photo-ops, but failed to mollify Wiley's cadres and the
masses they mobilized, who wanted cash. "The violence of the [welfare
rights] movement was frightening," recalls Lindsay budget aid Charles
Morris. Black militants laid siege to City Hall, bearing signs saying "No
Money, No Peace."
Lindsay answered these provocations with ever-more-generous
programs of appeasement in the form of welfare dollars. New York's welfare
rolls had been growing by 12% per year already before Lindsay took office. The
rate jumped to 50% annually in 1966. During Lindsay's first term
of office, welfare spending in New York City more than doubled, from $400
million to $1 billion annually. Outlays for the poor consumed 28% of the city's
budget by 1970. "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," Sol
Stern wrote in the City Journal.
As a direct result of its massive welfare spending, New York
City was forced to declare bankruptcy in 1975. The entire state of New York
nearly went down with it. The Cloward-Piven strategy had proved its effectiveness.
Crucial to Wiley's success was the cooperation of radical
sympathizers inside the federal government, who supplied Wiley's movement with
grants, training, and logistical assistance, channeled through federal War on Poverty
programs such as VISTA's.
The Cloward-Piven strategy depended on surprise. Once
society recovered from the initial shock, the backlash began. New York's
welfare crisis horrified America, 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.
Most Americans to this day have never heard of Cloward and
Piven. But New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani attempted to expose them in the
late 1990s. As his drive for welfare reform gained momentum, 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 July 20, 1998 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."
In a January 2011 article in the Nation magazine, Frances
Fox Piven would reflect upon the elements that had helped make the
welfare-rights movement successful in the 1960s:
"Before people can mobilize for collective action, they
have to develop a proud and angry identity and a set of claims that go with
that identity. They have to go from being hurt and ashamed to being angry and
indignant. Welfare moms in the 1960s did this by naming themselves 'mothers'
instead of 'recipients,'"
In the same 2011 article, Piven noted that "protesters
need targets, preferably local and accessible ones capable of making some kind
of response to angry demands."
After the welfare-rights movement had run its course by the
mid-1970s, Cloward and Piven never again revealed their intentions as candidly
as they had in their 1966 article. 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.
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. Cloward and Piven despised
America's electoral system every bit as much as they despised its welfare
system, and for much the same reason. They believed that welfare checks and
voting rights were mere bones tossed to the poor to keep them docile. The poor
did not need welfare checks and ballots, they argued. The poor needed revolution.
In their 1977 book, Poor People's Movements: Why They
Succeed, How They Fail, Cloward and Piven asserted that the "electoral
process" actually served the interests of the ruling classes, providing a
safety valve to drain away the anger of the poor. The authors wrote that
"as long as lower-class groups abided by the norms governing the electoral-representative system, they would have little
influence.. [I]t is usually when unrest among the lower classes breaks out of
the confines of electoral procedures that the poor may have some
influence," as when poor people engage in "strikes," "riots,"
"crime," "incendiarism," "massive school
truancy," "worker absenteeism," "rent defaults," and
other forms of "mass defiance" and "institutional
disruption."
In 1981, Cloward and Piven wrote that poor people lose power
"when leaders try to turn movements into electoral organizations."
That is because the "capability of the poor" to effect change lies
"in the vulnerability of societal institutions to disruption, and not in
the susceptibility of these institutions to transformation through the votes of
the poor."
To advance their radical agenda, Cloward and Piven focused more
intently on transforming the Democratic Party rather than the Republican Party.
Because Democrats professed to represent the lower classes, many poor people believed they could get what they wanted by voting Democrat.
Thus their energies would be channeled into useless "voter activity,"
rather than strikes, riots, "incendiarism" and the like.
Ten years earlier, when Cloward and Piven determined that
the welfare state was acting as a safety valve for the establishment, they
resolved to destroy the welfare state. The method of destruction they chose was
drawn from the teachings of Saul Alinsky: "Make the enemy live up to
their own book of rules." And so they did, challenging the welfare state
to pay out every penny to every person theoretically entitled to it. Alinsky
called this sort of tactic "mass jujitsu" - using "the strength
of the enemy against itself. Now Cloward and Piven concluded that the
Democratic Party was also acting as a safety valve for the establishment. Thus
they would try to force Democrats to "live up to their own book of
rules" -- i.e., if the Democrats say they represent the poor, let them
prove it.
Cloward and Piven presented their plan in a December 1982
article titled, "A Movement Strategy to Transform the Democratic
Party," published in the left-wing journal Social Policy. They sought to
do to the voting system what they had previously done to the welfare system.
They would flood the polls with millions of new voters, drawn from the angry
ranks of the underclass, all belligerent and the demanding their voting rights.
The result would be a catastrophic disruption of America's electoral system,
the authors predicted.
Cloward and Piven hoped that the flood of new voters would
provoke a backlash from Democrats and Republicans alike, who would join forces
to disenfranchise the unruly hordes, using such expedients as purging invalid voters
from the rolls, imposing cumbersome registration procedures, stiffening
residency requirements, and so forth. This voter-suppression campaign would
spark "a political firestorm over democratic rights," they wrote.
Voting-rights activists would descend on America's election boards and polling
stations much as George Wiley's welfare warriors had flooded social-services
offices. Wrote Cloward and Piven:
"By staging rallies, demonstrations, and sit-ins . over
every new restriction on registration procedures, a protest movement can
dramatize the conflict.... Through conflict, the registration movement will
convert registering and voting into meaningful acts of collective
protest."
The expected conflict would also expose the hypocrisy of the
Democratic Party, which would be "disrupted and transformed," the
authors predicted. A new party would rise from the ashes of the old. Outwardly,
it would preserve the forms and symbols of the old Democratic Party, but the
new Democratswould be genuine partisans of the poor, dedicated to class
struggle. This was the radical vision driving the Voting Rights Movement.
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ACORN spearheaded this "voting rights" movement,
which was led by veterans of George Wiley's welfare rights crusade. Also key to
the movement were Project Vote and
Human SERVE, both founded in 1982.
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Project Vote is an ACORN front group, launched by former
NWRO organizer and ACORN co-founder Zach Polett. Human SERVE was founded by
Richard 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 President Bill Clinton ultimately signed in 1993. At the White House
signing ceremony for this bill, both Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven were
in attendance.
The new law eliminated many controls on voter fraud, making
it easy for voters to register but difficult to determine the validity of new registrations.
Under the new law, states were required to provide opportunities for voter
registration to any person who showed up at a government office to renew a
driver's license or to apply for welfare or unemployment benefits.
"Examiners were under orders not to ask anyone for identification or proof
of citizenship," notes Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund in his
book, Stealing Elections. "States had to permit mailing voter
registrations, which allowed anyone to register without any personal contact
with a registrar or election officials. Finally, states were limited in pruning
'deadwood' -people who had died, moved, or been convicted of crimes - from
their rolls.
The Motor-Voter bill did indeed cause the voter rolls to be
swamped with 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 during
the 1990s, and culminating in the Florida recount crisis in the 2000
presidential election. On the eve of the
2000 election, in Indiana alone, state officials discovered that one in five registered
voters were duplicates, deceased, or otherwise invalid.
The cloud of confusion hanging over elections serves leftist
agitators well. "President Bush came to office without a clear
mandate," the leftwing billionaire George Soros declared. "He was
elected president by a single vote on the Supreme
Court." Once again, the "flood-the-rolls"
strategy had done its work. Cloward, Piven, and their disciples had introduced
a level of fear, tension, and foreboding to U.S. elections previously
encountered mainly in Third World countries.
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In January 2010, journalist John Fund reported that Congressman Barney Frank and U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer were
preparing to unveil legislation calling for "universal voter
registration," whereby any person whose name was on any federal roll at
all -- be it a list of welfare recipients, food stamp recipients, unemployment
compensation recipients, licensed drivers, convicted felons, property owners,
etc. -- would automatically be registered
to vote in political elections. Without corresponding
identity-verification measures at polling places, such a law would vastly
expand the pool of eligible voters, thereby multiplying the opportunities for
fraudulent voters to cast ballots under other people's names.
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Both the Living Wage and Voting Rights movements depend
heavily on financial support from George Soros's Open Society Institute and his
"Shadow Party," through whose support the Cloward-Piven strategy
continues to provide a blueprint for some of the Left's most ambitious
campaigns to overload, and cause the collapse of, various American
institutions. Leftists such as Barack Obama euphemistically refer to this
collapse as a " fundamental transformation," on the theory that
society can only be improved by destroying the deeply flawed existing order and
replacing it with what they view as a better alternative. Click here to read
about more recent efforts by the Left to overload the American system.
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Source: COLLAPSING THE SYSTEM on PURPOSE by Discover the
Network
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Major Resource: The Shadow Party, by David Horowitz and
Richard Poe (Nashville, TN: Nelson Current, 2006), pp, 106-128.
Comments
Obama worked for ACORN as an Attorney, helping ACORN
extort lenders into relaxing their lending standards. This led to the 2008 Meltdown
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader
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