NOTE: Emphasis is mine throughout.
We know Obama, and we know ACORN, but what’s a “Cloward-Piven?”
A disease? A 1930’s era town car? A medical instrument for clowarding a piven?
None of the above.
Cloward-Piven is a socio-political strategy developed by Richard Cloward and Frances Priven (a pair of radical leftist and Colombia University sociology professors) in the 1960s.
It’s a strategy of forcing political change through orchestrated crisis. The “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. They wrote “the ultimate objective of this strategy is to wipe out poverty by establishing a guaranteed annual income via the outright redistribution of income.”
Orchestrated Crisis.
If some of this sounds like you've heard it before, it's probably because Cloward and Piven were inspired by radical organizer (our old friend), Saul Alinsky.
Alinsky wrote in his 1989 book Rules for Radicals, “Make the enemy live up to their (sic) own book of rules.” When pressed to honor every word of every law and statute, every Judeo-Christian moral tenet, and every implicit promise of the liberal social contract, human agencies inevitably fall short. The system’s 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.
They designed the strategy to create political, financial, and social chaos that would result in revolution, all the while blending in Alinsky concepts to bring about a change in U.S. government. To achieve their revolutionary change, Cloward and Piven sought to use a cadre of aggressive organizers assisted by friendly news media to force a re-distribution of the nation’s wealth.
Sounding familiar?
In an article written for The Nation, Cloward and Piven were specific about the kind of “crisis” they were trying to create: By crisis, they meant 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.
The Cloward-Piven strategy emphasizes these goals:
- To organize previously unorganized groups eligible for government benefits, but not currently receiving all they can.
- To identify new beneficiaries and/or create new benefits.
- To impose new stresses on target systems, with the ultimate goal of forcing their collapse.
Target: New York City
Capitalizing on the racial unrest of the 1960s, Cloward and Piven saw the welfare system as their first target. They enlisted radical black activist George Wiley, who created the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) to implement the strategy in New York City.
The movement’s impact on New York City was jolting: welfare caseloads, already climbing 12 percent a year in the early sixties, rose by 50 percent during Mayor John Lindsay’s first two years; spending doubled., The city had 150,000 welfare cases in 1960; a decade later, it had 1.5 million.
The vast expansion of welfare in New York City that came of the NWRO’s 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.
Cloward and Piven looked at this strategy as a gold mine of opportunity. Within the newly organized groups, each offensive would find an ample pool of foot soldier recruits willing to advance its radical agenda at little or no pay, and expand its base of reliable voters, legal or otherwise.
The radicals’ threatening tactics also would accrue an intimidating reputation, providing a wealth of opportunities for extorting monetary and other concessions from the target organizations.
Do the names Jackson and Sharpton ring a bell?
Moreover, this kind of mass influence is cumulative because benefits are continuous. Once eligibility for basic food and rent grants is established, the drain on local resources persists indefinitely.
ACORN is born.
In 1970, one of George Wiley’s protégés, Wade Rathke – like Bill Ayers, a member of the radical Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) – founded the Arkansas Community Organizations for Reform Now. While NWRO had made a good start, it could not accomplish the Cloward-Piven goals alone. Rathke’s group broadened the offensive to include a wide array of low-income “rights.” Shortly thereafter, they changed “Arkansas” to “Association of” and ACORN went nationwide.
ACORN’s voter rights tactics follow the Cloward-Piven Strategy:
· Register as many democrat voters as possible, legal or otherwise and help them vote, multiple times if possible.
· Overwhelm the system with fraudulent registrations using multiple entries of the same name, names of deceased, random names from the phone book, even contrived names.
· Make the system difficult to police by lobbying for minimal (or NO) identification standards.
[Barack Obama aided ACORN as their lead attorney in a successful suit he brought against the Illinois state government to implement the Motor Voter law there.]
Cloward and Piven’s aspirations for ACORN’s voter registration efforts continued. By advocating massive, no-holds-barred voter registration campaigns, Cloward & Piven sought a Democratic administration in Washington, D.C. that would re-distribute the nation’s wealth and lead to a totalitarian socialist state.
ACORN is at the forefront of an illegal immigration movement as well, and was a leading organization among a broad coalition of radical groups, including George Soros’ Open Society Institute, the Service Employees International Union (ACORN founder Wade Rathke also runs a SEIU chapter), and others, that became the Coalition for Comprehensive Immigration Reform.
ACORN’s dual offensives on voting and illegal immigration are handy complements. Both swell the voter rolls with reliable democrats while assaulting the country ACORN seeks to destroy with overwhelming new problems.
ACORN and the Mortgage Crisis.
Enter the mortgage crisis, which has sent a shock wave through Wall Street and panicked world financial markets like no other since the market crash of 1929. But it is a problem created in Washington long ago. It originated with the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), signed into law in 1977 by President Jimmy Carter. The CRA was Carter’s answer to a grassroots activist movement started in Chicago, which forced banks to make loans to low income, high-risk customers.
ACORN aggressively sought to expand loans to low income groups using the CRA as a whip.
In the 1980s, groups like ACORN began pushing charges of “redlining” - claims that banks discriminated against minorities in mortgage lending. In 1989, sympathetic members of Congress got the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act amended to force banks to collect racial data on mortgage applicants; this allowed various studies to be conducted that seemed to validate the original accusation.
In fact, minority mortgage applications were rejected more frequently than other applications - but the overwhelming reason wasn’t racial discrimination, but simply that minorities tended to have weaker finances.
It should come as no surprise that ACORN was the driving force behind a 1995 regulatory revision pushed through by the Clinton Administration that greatly expanded the CRA. That revision laid the groundwork for the Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac financial crisis we now confront. [A young public-interest lawyer in Chicago by the name of Barack Obama represented ACORN at the time.]
Ironically, an enthusiastic Fannie Mae Foundation report had singled out one paragon of nondiscriminatory lending, which worked with community activists and followed “the most flexible underwriting criteria permitted.” That lender’s $1 billion commitment to low-income loans in 1992 had grown to $80 billion by 1999 and $600 billion by early 2003.
The lender they were speaking of was Countrywide – rescued by Bank of America in July – which specialized in subprime lending and had a working relationship with ACORN.