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-Pivens 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 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 systems 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 Alinskys 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. The specific function of these Trojan Horse movements was 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, at least, was the theory behind the Cloward-Piven strategy. 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. Like ACORN, the organization that spear-headed this campaign, the new voting rights movement was led by veterans of George Wileys welfare rights crusade. Its flagship organizations were Project Vote and Human SERVE, both founded in 1982. Project Vote is an ACORN front group, launched by former NWRO organizer and ACORN co-founder Zach Polett. Human SERVE was founded by Richard A. 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 Bill Clinton ultimately signed in 1993. The Motor-Voter bill is widely blamed today for swamping the voter rolls with dead wood - 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. The new voting rights coalition combines mass voter registration drives - typically featuring high levels of fraud - with systematic intimidation of election officials in the form of frivolous lawsuits, bogus charges of racism and disenfranchisement and direct action (street protests, violent or otherwise). Just as they swamped Americas welfare offices in the 1960s, the Cloward-Piven team now seeks to overwhelm the nations understaffed and poorly policed electoral system. Their antics set the stage for the Florida recount crisis of 2000, and have introduced a level of fear, tension and foreboding to U.S. elections heretofore encountered mainly in Third World countries. For more information on the Voting Rights Movement, see the entry for Project Vote. Both the Living Wage and Voting Rights movements depend heavily on financial support from George Soross Open Society Institute. It is largely thanks to money from Soros that the Cloward-Piven strategy continues even now to eat away at Americas political and economic infrastructure.
Posted on: Mon, 12 Jan 2015 10:03:32 +0000
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