Alinsky-Cloward-Piven-Obama: Finally it has a Name

I admit to not being familiar with Cloward-Piven until recently. These contemporaries of Saul Alinsky were socialist activists with a plan. The actual objectives of the Cloward-Piven Strategy, as it is now called, were not as wide sweeping as the nation’s Leftist political strategists of today are enjoying. But the strategy has worked and it is still viable for the bigger picture under Obama. Cloward-Piven wanted a single objective: a guaranteed universal living wage. This would end poverty, and the morality of that end justified any means to get it.

In order to get such a thing, they proposed to overload the welfare system with double the number of poor people demanding their entitlement “rights”. This would overload the system, eventually crashing it. The result would bring the poverty stricken minorities together in angry, chaotic strikes at the remaining bureaucracies. The Leftist journalism outlets would generate sympathy for the poor, both in the general populace and in the government. In the chaos of the crisis caused by the deliberate system crash, politicians would suddenly see that a guaranteed universal living wage was the only solution.

The Cloward-Piven "manifesto" is reprinted at discoverthenetworks.com:

”A series of welfare drives in large cities would, we believe, impel action on a new federal program to distribute income, eliminating the present public welfare system and alleviating the abject poverty which it perpetrates. Widespread campaigns to register the eligible poor for welfare aid, and to help existing recipients obtain their full benefits, would produce bureaucratic disruption in welfare agencies and fiscal disruption in local and state governments. These disruptions would generate severe political strains, and deepen existing divisions among elements in the big-city Democratic coalition: the remaining white middle class, the white working-class ethnic groups and the growing minority poor. To avoid a further weakening of that historic coalition, a national Democratic administration would be con-strained to advance a federal solution to poverty that would override local welfare failures, local class and racial conflicts and local revenue dilemmas. By the internal disruption of local bureaucratic practices, by the furor over public welfare poverty, and by the collapse of current financing arrangements, powerful forces can be generated for major economic reforms at the national level.”


The ultimate aim of this strategy is a new program for direct income distribution. What reason is there to expect that the federal government will enact such legislation in response to a crisis in the welfare system?

We ordinarily think of major legislation as taking form only through established electoral processes We tend to overlook the force of crisis in precipitating legislative reform, partly because we lack a theoretical framework by which to understand the impact of major disruptions.

By crisis, we mean a publicly visible disruption in some institutional sphere. Crisis can occur spontaneously (e.g., riots) or as the intended result of tactics of demonstration and protest which either generate institutional disruption or bring unrecognized disruption to public attention. Public trouble is a political liability, it calls for action by political leaders to stabilize the situation. Because crisis usually creates or exposes conflict, it threatens to produce cleavages in a political consensus which politicians will ordinarily act to avert."

How could they have anticipated their good fortune to have an Alinsky organizer elected president – by huge minority support – as well as a Democratic congress so controlled that even filibuster was ruled out, at least for Obama’s first year. Plus the existing crisis of collapsing financing and economic systems brought on by purposeful “American Dream” legislation which seemed to be actually designed to create collapse, what more could a crisis strategist want?

With every federal move destined to exacerbate the crisis, and grabbing more means through health care “reform” to create a new crisis, Alinsky-Cloward-Pimm-Obama (ACPO) seemed destined for success.

When viewed in light of this type of strategy, a great preponderance of Democratic moves make sense. And even if the great collapse doesn’t come immediately, the momentum toward the wall has been increased considerably.

The ultimate failure of the entire nation now seems to be within the grasp of the ACPO's. Merely by drunkenly spending the nation into a completely unrecompensible debt, the nation's systems of all types will be stressed to the failing point.





According to an analysis at discoverthenetworks.com,

"Cloward and Piven recruited a militant black organizer named George Wiley to lead their new movement. In the summer of 1967, 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.

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," writes 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."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."

Within the ACPO strategy, even such things as the constant decline in public education, the erosion of national sovereignty, the ignoring of constitutional limits, the pursuit of victimology as policy, as well as purposeful fiscal irresponsibility all come into focus. The Consequentialist Left is in their heyday; perhaps they have squandered it in Massachussetts, perhaps not. They are on the move in a big way.