Cloward-Piven Everywhere And barely time to think.

The Obama administration-driven calamity at this nation’s southern border 
is no naiveté-caused accident. Instead, it’s the latest manifestation of 
what clear-eyed observers must recognize is just one of many concerted
attempts to overwhelm this nation’s institutions and its social, 
psychological and physical infrastructure for the apparent purpose of 
leaving it permanently weakened and fundamentally changed.

Conscious 
or not — and I would argue in most cases that it is quite conscious — 
what we’re seeing is a comprehensive application of the left’s 
long-championed Cloward-Piven strategy.

The 
folklore behind the strategy claims that its enunciation by Richard A. 
Cloward and Frances Fox Piven “only” involved collapsing the welfare 
system to create a political climate receptive to the idea of a 
“guaranteed annual income,” and — presto! — “an end to poverty.”

The idea advanced in the couple’s May 1966 column in The Nationwas 
to have those whom they saw as naively self-reliant recognize that they 
were legally entitled to receive benefits and to have them apply for 
public assistance en masse. This would “produce bureaucratic disruption 
in welfare agencies and fiscal disruption in local and state 
governments,” thus requiring a federal solution which would, in their fevered minds, “eliminate poverty by the outright redistribution of income.”

The 
folklore also contends that the strategy didn’t work. That’s not really 
true. It really did collapse the system in one city, and it permanently 
changed national attitudes towards public assistance. As James Simpsonobserved at American Thinker in September 2008 (still-working links are in the original):

Capitalizing on the racial unrest of the 1960s, Cloward and Piven saw the welfare system as their first target.

… According to a City Journal article by Sol Stern, 
welfare rolls increased from 4.3 million to 10.8 million by the 
mid-1970s as a result, and in New York City, where the strategy had been 
particularly successful, “one person was on the welfare rolls … for 
every two working in the city’s private economy.”

… 
The vast expansion of welfare in New York City that came of … 
Cloward-Piven tactics sent the city into bankruptcy in 1975. Rudy 
Giuliani cited Cloward and Piven by name as being responsible for “an 
effort at economic sabotage.” He also credited Cloward-Piven with 
changing the cultural attitude toward welfare from that of a temporary 
expedient to a lifetime entitlement, an attitude which in-and-of-itself 
has caused perhaps the greatest damage of all.

That damage includes welfare-driven family breakups and sky-high out-of-wedlock birth rates.

Cloward 
and Piven targeted other applications from the very beginning. The 
authors telegraphed their broader intent in that infamous 1966 column 
(italics are theirs):

"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."

Former Obama adviser and now Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s oft-citedstatement that “you never let a serious crisis go to waste” is in no way an original thought.

The 
left has long since figured out that focusing Cloward-Piven on only one 
aspect of society at a time is nowhere near as effective as applying it 
on multiple fronts over time. The strategy’s specific applications 
arguably include at least the following:

• The 2008 financial meltdown. The 
  run-up to the 2008 financial meltdown and the accompanying recession 
  was driven by the Community Reinvestment Act, which was eventually 
  toughened to the point of effectively compelling banks to make trillions 
  of dollars in mortgage loans to objectively unqualified buyers. 
  “Government-sponsored enterprises” Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac made the 
  problem exponentially worse by systematically deceiving the securities 
  markets and their shareholders about the underlying quality of loans 
  they purchased from mortgage lenders. As a result, we now have 
  Dodd-Frank, the completely unaccountable Consumer Financial Protection 
• 
  Bureau, a mortgage lending market where even the simplest transaction
• 
  takes several months to complete, and a homebuilding industry seemingly 
  destined to indefinitely remain a shadow of its former self.
• Record deficits and national debt buildup. Despite 
  the stock market arguing to the contrary, the roughly $6 trillion in 
  deficits deliberately rung up during Obama’s presidency, along with a 
  nearly $7 trillion increase in the national debt, have the financial 
  system again on the verge of implosion. Will the Federal Reserve really 
  ever be able to liquidate its over $4 trillion in holdings of government 
  and mortgage securities without causing the economy to grind to a halt?
• Social Security and Medicare. 
• Despite 
  changing demographics, these programs have barely been touched since
  their inception. Their status quo is indisputably unsustainable in the 
  long run. Leftist opposition to any change whatsoever to either is best 
  seen as a slow-motion Cloward-Piven effort to guarantee their failure.
• Obamacare. The 
• Affordable Care Act’s hopelessly incompetent rollout, ongoing 
  management nightmares and constantly changing arbitrary rules appear to 
  have been concocted to impose utter chaos on 
  the health care system and ultimately to bring about a single-payer, 
  i.e., government-run, system. If that’s really so, early returns 
  indicate that it’s working, as the statist regime’s drag on the economy —
  and not this winter’s miserable weather — was a primary cause of the 
  economy’s recently estimated 2 percent annualized first-quarter contraction.
• 
  
• The IRS scandal. Cloward-Piven 
  is now being used by those in power to destroy the opposition. The IRS 
  scandal is best understood as a scheme to bulldoze opponents with 
  time-consuming, burdensome bureaucratic barriers and harassment at the 
  hands of an agency with apparently unlimited resources — at least for 
  this priority.
• 
  
• Regulation. Along 
  those same lines, in recent years the federal government’s regulatory 
  apparatus, whose employees were originally more interested in job 
  preservation, now appear to have taken to rolling over their targets 
  with costly, voluminous and virtually indecipherable rules 
  restrictions, harassing litigation, and aggressive demonization. 
  Post-recession start-up activity and new employment arising from those 
  efforts are both at record lows. Who wants to get big enough to get 
  noticed by the administration’s regulatory thugs?
• 
  
• Scandal exhaustion. The 
  sheer volume of serious Obama administration scandals seems to comprise 
• 
  a Cloward-Piven attempt to overwhelm opponents. With so many scandals 
• 
  out there, no single outrage can generate concerted, sufficiently 
  visible opposition. Those who contend that this situation is not 
  deliberate apparently expect us to believe that the original volunteered 
  appearances on the same day in 
  May 2013 of the IRS scandal and the Department of Justice’s admission 
  that it monitored phone records at the Associated Press represented some 
• 
  kind of odd coincidence.

Not 
every Cloward-Piven attempt has been successful. In retrospect, the 
late-1990s Internet bubble, largely caused by a deliberately asleep at 
the switch Securities and Exchange Commission which allowed scores of 
companies with no history and no chance of success to go public, may 
have been designed to bring about a financial crisis. The trouble with 
that strategy is that “the wrong guy” won the 2000 election. Even so, 
that debacle helped give us the economy-stifling mountain of busywork 
known as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.

For 
all practical purposes, Cloward-Piven is now a staple of leftist 
electoral campaign strategy. As one commenter recently noted (I 
unfortunately lost track of where it originated), the Obama reelection 
campaign’s 2012 strategy “wasn’t just to publish propaganda, but to 
publish (and) distribute propaganda in such magnitudes that that folks 
didn’t even have to think about it, they would just foam at the mouth at 
the mere mention of (Mitt) Romney’s name.”

As to the recent wave of “Unaccompanied Alien Children” — that’s the Department of Homeland Security’s term, 
not mine — make no mistake. President Barack Obama and his advisers had 

to know that hordes of unaccompanied children would be sent to cross 
our southern border when he unilaterally imposed “Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals” in June of 2012. Despite seeing its results, Homeland Security renewed DACA for two more years earlier this month. The default assumption simply must be that “Obama is using these children as pawns to implement his goal of universal citizenship for illegal immigrants.”

In other words, it’s Cloward-Piven, yet again.

Comment: 
Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, both of whom were socialists, 
were a husband and wife team of Sociology professors at Columbia 
University, and the ultimate aim of their strategy was to overwhelm and 
collapse the "capitalist" economy of the U.S., forcing us to a 
Euro-style socialism. That Barack Obama attended Columbia while both 
Cloward and Piven were alive is no coincidence, and is most likely one 
of the major reasons that his transcripts are "untouchable" -- it is 
highly likely that he took one or more courses from both of them. From 
the results of his economic policies it is clear the he is implementing 
the Cloward-Piven strategy from the top down.