Manufacturing a Crisis: The Cloward-Piven Strategy
If you’re like me, you may have had occasion to wonder whether the Obama administration really wants the U.S. economy to recover. Doesn’t it seem that the policy of spending money to stimulate the economy is actually leading to our ruination? The government borrows money (from the Chinese) and prints more money to give to consumers so they can buy more goods (Chinese goods, no doubt?) and all of this spending is supposed to pull the US out of the recession, while we accumulate monstrous deficits, which add to our ballooning national debt and devalue the dollar. Remember Rahm Emmanuel’s now famous quote “Never let a serious crisis go to waste. What I mean by that is it’s an opportunity to do things you couldn’t do before.” Once elected, Obama and the Democrats went on a monumental spending spree, with stimulus packages, corporate and banking takeovers, and bail outs, and now pending, Obamacare and Cap and Trade legislation. Did you get suspicious? It did seem an awful lot like a pent up Democratic shopping list that, under the guise of stimulating the economy, was being used to fund every leftist program on the wish list while paying off every constituency that supported their agenda.
Well, apparently, we’re not just a bunch of conspiracy nuts after all. Enter the work of Richard Cloward and Frances Piven, two sociologists from Columbia University who also happen to have been inspired by Saul Alinsky in devising their “Cloward-Piven Strategy.” The Cloward-Piven Strategy was put forth in a May 1966 paper entitled, “A Strategy to End Poverty.” The strategy was described at DiscoverTheNetwork.org as follows:
[T]he “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. . . .
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.
By implementing a “massive drive to recruit the poor onto the welfare rolls,” Cloward and Piven hoped to cause “a profound financial and political crisis” (Cloward and Piven quoted by DiscoverTheNetwork.org), which could lead to the collapse of capitalism and the implementation of a socialist agenda. Following Cloward and Piven’s recommendations, in 1967 the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) was formed by black militant George Wiley. The repercussions don’t stop there. In 1982 veterans of NWRO founded a new “voting rights movement,” with two new organizations, Project Vote and Human SERVE. The former of the two is an ACORN front group. According to DiscoverTheNetwork.org, these groups promoted the Voter-Motor bills that led to voting rolls becoming swamped with “dead wood,” that is, “invalid registrations signed in the name of deceased, ineligible or non-existent people -- thus opening the door to the unprecedented levels of voter fraud.”
While it’s not my contention that Obama and his supporters created the current financial crisis, it does seem worth inquiring whether or not their policies may be deliberately prolonging the recession in order to push through a breathtaking expansion of the U.S. government, taking over vast sectors of the economy under the false claim that this statist putsch will actually stimulate the economy and end the recession. After all, there’s much evidence that Roosevelt’s New Deal policies actually prolonged the depression, or perhaps even turned a garden variety recession into the Great Depression (see “Study: FDR Policies Prolonged Depression,” Newsmax.com, Tuesday, October 7, 2008).
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Comments
Capitalism is on the last stage of collapse. Stock market is its epitome, as such more funds of bailouts are diverted to Wall Street instead of main street. Capitalism has its own contradictions, which will bring it down sooner or later. Capitalist economists are selling ‘free market’ philosophy in place of existing monopoly and oligopoly markets. Economists, as Paul Samuelson says, who are known to be radical are less likely to be courted by business school deans and are less likely to succumb to available suitors…The man who adores the business is likely to lose objectivity. And the man who hates business is also handicapped in being objective. Neither Casanovas nor misogynists are apt to make cracker-jack obstetricians. He calls them ‘kept men’ who will never talk impartially. This is the reason, real picture of capitalism is hidden from discussions.
Contradiction within capitalism are: 1. No ‘free market’ as defined in any economics textbook in existence. 2. Only PART of the economy instead of WHOLE of economy is considered in capitalism. 3. Wage-employment is only considered to define full employment. There are huge number of people who earn income outside wage-employment but not considered. 4. Objective to maximize the profit takes it to have unending inflation and depression. Business cycle is the final outcome. 5. Poverty and widening gap between rich and poor are essential for the survival of capitalism. 6. Economic concentration through man-made monopoly laws (patents, trademarks, limited liability corporations, trade unions, etc) is the objective all the time. It could be either in private sector as in the USA and Europe or in the hands of state as was in USSR. 7. Warfares and capitalism have to go together. They cannot survive independently.
True Free Market, if implemented, capitalism will vanish soon. 8. Surplus value, as defined by Karl Marx, if fully retained with the creator instead of distributing to non-working shareholders, capitalism will not exist, though it is the best and right solution.9. There is no economic theory for monopoly in capiatlsm.
Investment in productive activities creates abundance due to techology and science development. Abundance is an enemy of capitalism. It was known to Adam Smith as well as to JM Keynes. Both of them and their blind supporters had to find solutions like deficit finance and creating artificial demands through advertisements to make capitalism survive. Keynes was, however, aware that his solutions would not guaranee eternal capitalist economic order. Effects of his temporary solutions are now reaching the climax. Monetary tools divert investments from manufacturing to trading and speculations. That is the final stage of collapse of capitalism. This is what we are now witnessing. Marx says, “Laws should bring people together and not divide them. Man-made laws are against Nature’s laws as such they are immoral. What is immoral cannot be immortal”. He is right in saying this, but forgot to implement it in his economic theory. Hence it collapsed.
Nature has given enought brain power to each human being to use innovative skills and sustainable and defensive mechanism to survive. These cannot be ignored while designing any new economic system for well being of mankind as a whole. Is there any economic theory to take care of these requirements available in the world.
Yes, an economic theory based on these parameters and fully backed by modern economic theories was presented in 1993 by an Indian economist Dr. M G Bokare. He was Marxist for over three decades but got disillusioned with Marxian economics. He found solutions in Hindu Vedas and other religious books written in ancient India(BC). This is rightly claimed to be eternal economic order. It is also fully eco-firendly economic order. He has called this new economics “Hindu-economics” for this reason. This is based on Hindu ethos and simple and non-exploitative living styes. This is based on abundance of goods and services. This promises full employment, inflation-free and stagflation-free economic order. It also abolishes povert, interest, inflation and reduces direct taxes. This is an alternative to capitalism and Marxian economics. Economists have to look at it before capitalism finally collapses. Second edition of this book is now available from http://www.pothi.com.
Capitalism has brought the mankind as well as the planet itself to the final point of destruction. Now is the point whether we allow this kind of destruction.
The USA and Europe have most of the Noble Laureates in economics. How come they could not protect capitalism from its collapse? Answer is clear. They were not holding any opinion against capitalists, as Paul Samuelson called them ‘kept men’. Now is the time for all those independent minded people of ths world to get uinited to save this planet and the mankind.
HIndu economics! Give me a break. Do you plan to reinstate the caste system? Anybody so full of B.S. should get his own blog. You’re right about one thing though: There is no free market in our current system which is actually closer to fascism, a corporate-business monopoly system. The Fed, which has messed everything up was put in place by the US government. We have an alphabet soup of government regulators. The rest of your screed is nothing but a bunch of utopian nonsense which has been proven wrong by history. Enough said.
Holy God, what a wall of text by D G Bokare. TLDNR.
Anyway, I’d like to respond to this statement:
[quote]After all, there’s much evidence that Roosevelt’s New Deal policies actually prolonged the depression, or perhaps even turned a garden variety recession into the Great Depression[/quote]
The UCLA guys are right in the sense that the anti-competition and pro-labor measures of FDR did make things worse but that doesn’t necessarily mean that stimulus spending in general is a bad thing. Honestly, we all know that it was WWII that pulled us out of the Great Depression and what did WWII cause? You guessed it… massive deficit spending. Hrm…
I’m not so sure that WWII pulled us out of the depression. What it did do was end the worst effect of the depression, massive unemployment, but war in itself can’t end a depression unless you think that building and destroying things is economic progress! I think the true recovery came along post-war, as Thomas Woods argued in Meltdown. Only with the real economy purring along can the ratio of debt to GDP decline.
P.S. Our friend Bokare apparently doesn’t understand economics or capitalism, and profits have nothing to do with inflation or the business cycle. Inflation is caused by governments or central banks increasing the quantity of money or devaluing the value of the currency. The history of utopian economic and political schemes is always bathed in blood and violence There are so many things wrong with his screed that it would take an equally lengthy rebuttal, and frankly, I don’t think it’s worth the time or effort.