by Brandon Smith
In the mid-sixties at the height of the “social revolution” the line between democratic benevolence and outright communism became rather blurry. The Democratic Party, which controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress, was used as the springboard by social engineers to introduce a new era of welfare initiatives enacted in the name of “defending the poor”, also known as the “Great Society Programs”. These initiatives, however, were driven by far more subversive and extreme motivations, and have been expanded on by every presidency since, Republican and Democrat alike.
At Columbia University, sociologist professors Richard Cloward and Francis Fox Piven introduced a political strategy in 1966 in an article entitled ‘The Weight Of The Poor: A Strategy To End Poverty’. This article outlined a plan that they believed would eventually lead to the total transmutation of America into a full-fledged centralized welfare state (in other words, a collectivist enclave). The spearpoint of the Cloward-Piven strategy involved nothing less than economic sabotage against the U.S.
Theoretically, according to the doctrine, a condition of overwhelming tension and strain could be engineered through the overloading of American welfare rolls, thereby smothering the entitlement program structure at the state and local level. The implosion of welfare benefits would facilitate a massive spike in poverty and desperation, creating a financial crisis that would lead to an even greater cycle of demand for a fully socialized system. This desperation would then “force” the federal government to concentrate all welfare programs under one roof, nationalize and enforce a socialist ideology, and ultimately, compact an immense level of power into the hands of a select few.
Cloward and Piven claimed that this could be accomplished at a grassroots level through community activism, and, that it would facilitate a more compassionate federal authority, however, there are numerous problems with these assertions.
The Cloward-Piven Strategy has nothing to do with grassroots activism, and accomplishes nothing tangible for the downtrodden poverty class. In fact, I would dare to say that Cloward and Piven as well as most social engineers are well aware that the concept ultimately only serves to give even more dominance to the establishment and pilfer even more freedom from the masses.
Cloward-Piven is not limited to the destabilization of state and local welfare programs. It can easily be used against federal level entitlements, and in reality, is much more effective against an entity with the proven tendency towards exponential debt spending. Though the federal government may be able to borrow fiat dollars through the Federal Reserve to prolong welfare rolls while the states cannot, a more volatile threat arises when debt monetization begins to wear down the purchasing power of the currency. Weakened purchasing power results in reduced consumer activity, less industrial growth, less GDP, and obviously, more poverty. The dollar has lost approximately 98% of its purchasing power since 1972, and after 50 years of the so-called “War on Poverty”, nearly one third of the American population now repeatedly slips under the official poverty line.
In the past decade alone, the number of people dependent on food stamps and EBT for their survival in the U.S. has doubled from 25 million people to nearly 50 million people. Those who receive some kind of payment from the government, including those on social security, disability, and veterans benefits, are approximately 100 million. Americans on social security do not consider themselves welfare recipients because they paid into the system, however, the point remains that if the federal money tap shuts down due to overwhelming participation, the checks will stop whether you paid into the system or not.
In the end, it is the Federal Government itself that is most vulnerable to the Cloward-Piven Strategy, and I believe the goal is to set fire to ALL social structures in the U.S., then assimilate them into a new globalist system.
The tactic of overwhelming the welfare structure REQUIRES the complicity of the government itself. A grassroots activist movement cannot and will never compel federal and state governments to expand welfare initiatives if they do not wish to. If welfare programs are not expanded beyond their capacity to be maintained, they cannot be overwhelmed. Therefore, government must cooperate with the Cloward-Piven Strategy by generating more and more welfare programs to be exploited. That is to say, the elitists who control our government, regardless of their claimed political party, must WANT to arrange circumstances to allow for Cloward-Piven to be successful.
Another key component of Cloward-Piven is the existence of an immense number of poverty stricken people. Without a significant portion of the population under the poverty level, there is no mass of people to use as a weapon. Again, grassroots activists would be hard pressed to actually create the kind of poverty levels they would need for exploitation. But wait! Government, along with the aid or direction of central bankers, is able to create any level of poverty it wishes at any time by simply pretending to bungle everything it does. Once again, Cloward-Piven (much like Saul Alinsky’s repertoire of propaganda scams) is far more useful to the power elite than it is to the common citizen. As former White House Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, famously said:
“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before…”
In light of the Cloward-Piven Strategy, which is at its very core a method to artificially induce crisis, the otherwise insane policy actions of the Obama Administration and preceding puppet presidents now become perfectly logical. Obama, after all, has been a long time proponent of the methods of Saul Alinsky, the left wing gatekeeper equivalent to Neo-Con godfather Leo Strauss. Cloward and Piven were also both avid followers of Alinsky, who promoted lies, misdirection, subversion, and abandonment of conscience in order to win social power at any cost (special note – Alinsky also dedicated his book ‘Rules For Radicals’ to Lucifer…yeah, to the friggin’ devil).
Under Obama’s watch alone, our real national debt including unfunded liabilities and entitlements has risen to nearly $200 trillion. Our “official” national debt has gone from $10 trillion to $17 trillion in the short time Obama has been in office. Real unemployment including U-6 measurements stands at around 20% of all Americans. Personal wealth and savings have plummeted. Wages remain in stasis while prices on necessary goods continue to rise.
In my articles ‘The Socialization Of America Is Economically Impossible’ and ‘Obamacare: Is It A Divide-And-Conquer Distraction?’, I examined much evidence suggesting that Obamacare was actually designed to fail, and that the bumbling of the Obama White House when dealing with the program was purely deliberate. When coupled with Obama’s handling of the current illegal immigration conflict, I would say that the Cloward-Piven Strategy is in full force.
Why fight tooth and nail against all common sense and history, why lie openly to millions of registered voters to get the program in place, only to allow it to derail because of a poorly designed website!? Because, Obama and his handlers know full well that it will end up costing the country billions that we cannot afford, and aid in a resulting crash.
Why the sudden surge of illegal immigrants into the U.S.? Why not! The White House has made it clear that it has every intention of keeping them within America by allowing the border patrol to ship the detained across the country where they are then released. Obama’s threat to use executive action to force through his own version of the immigration bill is the icing on the cake. Amnesty is essentially guaranteed, I believe, in the near term, which is why tens of thousands of Central American parents are willing to send their children on a journey where they could very well be kidnapped by sex traffickers or killed. If the White House really wanted to stop this humanitarian crisis, the President would state publicly and clearly that America is not a drive through welfare center, that there will be no free goodies at the second window, and that there will be no chance of amnesty, instead of diverting more agents to the border to ensure more illegals are shipped into the interior.
The president does not wish to stop the flood of immigrants exactly because Cloward-Piven requires their presence. Not only would this officially add millions of people to welfare rolls, but I would venture to suggest that Obama will likely include automatic sign-up to universal healthcare as part of his amnesty measures.
If there wasn’t enough strain on the social welfare structure before, there certainly will be now.
I would remind readers, though, that in the final analysis this is NOT about Obama. I have seen other commentators including Glenn Beck discuss Cloward-Piven in the past, but always through the blinders of the false left/right paradigm. Obama could not have attained the levels of destabilization he has without standing on the shoulders of those political errand boys who came before him. Ronald Reagan, for instance, was also responsible for signing the Immigration Reform And Control Act of 1986 into law, which was supposed to trade the amnesty of 3 million illegals for greater border security. This new “more comprehensive” security was never implemented by Reagan. Both Republican and Democratic regimes have made our current calamity possible, and the leaderships behind both parties are nothing more than paid mascots for international financiers and globalists who have a very different vision of what America should be.
If we allow ourselves to fall into the trap of making the developing crisis about a singularly unimportant man such as Obama, then the elites get exactly what they want – an angry and desperate citizenry out for the blood of a middleman and out for the blood of each other, while they sit back, relax, and wait to swoop in as our financial saviors with strings attached.
For those naïve enough to assume that Cloward-Piven is just a well intentioned activist method, it is important to understand that even if that were so, the effect of the Cloward-Piven Strategy will never achieve the goal its creators claimed to support. In my view, it is probable that they never really intended for it to produce wealth equality or an increased quality of life.
The tactic can only decrease wealth security by making all citizens equally destitute. As we have seen in numerous socialist and communist experiments over the past century, economic harmonization never creates wealth or prosperity, it only siphons wealth from one area and redistributes it to others, evaporating much of it as it is squeezed through the grinding gears of the establishment machine. Socialism, in its very essence, elevates government to the role of all-pervasive parent, and casts the citizenry down into the role of dependent sniveling infant. Even in its most righteous form, Cloward-Piven seeks to make infants of us all, whether we like it or not.
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http://www.alt-market.com/articles/2212-is-the-cloward-piven-strategy-being-used-to-destroy-america