Free Republic

A Florida food stamp recruiter is tasked with enrolling at least 150 senior citizens in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, The Washington Post reports in a profile about SNAP outreach. Following 56 year old recruiter Dillie Nerios perform her task, to appeal to seniors to get them to sign up for food stamp benefits, The Post offers additional insight into the program — which has reached record participation levels in recent months — currently feeding more than 47 million people, or one in seven Americans. The story follows recruiter Dillie Nerios, 56, as she encourages approaches potentially SNAP-eligible seniors to...

Rosa Brooks serves as Counselor to the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Michele Flournoy. In May 2010 she also became Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense and then Special Coordinator for Rule of Law and Humanitarian Policy. She is running a new Pentagon office dedicated to those issues. She is on leave from her job as a law professor at the Georgetown University Law Center. Brooks is known as a columnist (most recently with the LA Times) and at the Pentagon her portfolio has included both human rights issues and global engagement and strategic communication. Her mother, Barbara Ehrenreich, is...

Yesterday, Mitt Romney said he’s “not going to say outrageous things about the president.” Trouble with that statement is that “outrageous” is a pretty subjective adjective. Outrageous to whom? Apparently, Romney meant to say he’s not going to say anything about the president that would outrage the left — because he doesn’t seem to be afraid to say something about the president that would outrage the right. In fact, he did just that earlier today, when he essentially said the president shouldn’t be held responsible for the high price of gas. “I think people recognize that the president can’t precisely...

Combine class warfare, demonizing the rich, getting as many people onto the welfare rolls as possible, and pushing the economic system to collapse and you have a flawless formula for Cloward-Piven 2.0 -- and a vehicle that ensures Obama remains in power. Cloward-Piven is a much talked-about strategy proposed in the mid-1960's by two Columbia University sociology professors named Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. The Cloward-Piven approach was sometimes referred to as the "crisis strategy," which they believed were a means to "end poverty." The premise of the Cloward-Piven collective/anti-capitalist gospel decried "individual mobility and achievement," celebrated organized...

In what could be a repeat of the easy-lending cycle that led to the housing crisis, the Justice Department has asked several banks to relax their mortgage underwriting standards and approve loans for minorities with poor credit as part of a new crackdown on alleged discrimination, according to court documents reviewed by IBD. [snip] Another Reno protege, Perez has compared bankers to Klansmen. Only difference is, he said, bankers discriminate "with a smile" and "fine print." He said this kind of racism, though more subtle, is "every bit as destructive as the cross burned in a neighborhood." Perez has put...

While part of the current unrest in Wisconsin is driven by local issues, new information has been uncovered indicating an orchestrated attempt to stir up 'worker protests' not only in Wisconsin but in at least a dozen states. The coordinated effort is part of a 'revolution' spearheaded in part by a group called 'Heartland Revolution,' a Kentucky-based political action organization. The group was first envisioned by a Kentucky Democrat, John Waltz, who announced his candidacy in 2009 to oppose 2-term Republican Geoff Davis for the 4th Congressional District. Waltz was defeated in the November 2010 midterm elections but embarked on...

I am reluctant to accept conspiracy theories. In 1966 sociologists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven proposed to overwhelm the political and economic system with welfare recipients forcing the government to guarantee a minimal national income. It has been interpreted as a desire to push a greater degree of socialism, forcing a collapse that would require central government control. It may have been a grand socialist strategy, but that does not necessarily translate into a conspiracy meant to overthrow the capitalist system. Regardless, it seems that although the system has become clearly overwhelmed with public pensions, unsustainable deficits, and reckless...

Obama associated with Marxists and other lefty radicals when he was young. This is not controversial. The real question is whether he still associates with such radical riff-raff today, or worse, is secretly carrying out their nefarious plans. In one case the answer is: we can only hope so. I am referring to the infamous Cloward-Piven Strategy, an undemocratic plan to force a basic income guarantee by overloading the welfare system with applicants.

If you promote violent leftist insurrection for a living, should you be surprised when anonymous members of the public threaten you with violence? Apparently. Take the case of Marxist professor and community organizer Frances Fox Piven, a frequent target of conservative talk-show host Glenn Beck. In the Nation magazine just last month, Ms. Piven expressed outrage that Wall Street bankers weren't being dragged from their homes and led to the guillotine because of the country's high unemployment rates and an anemic economy. "So where are the angry crowds, the demonstrations, sit-ins and unruly mobs? After all, the injustice is apparent,"...

The campaign to use the tragic shootings in Tucson to silence conservatives continues. The latest twist is an attempt to highlight anonymous threats against leftist scholar and strategist Frances Fox Piven as a way of forcing Glenn Beck, a critic of Piven, off the air, or at least prohibiting him from mentioning her on his Fox News television show. This affects me as well, since an excerpt from my recent appearance on Beck’s show to discuss Piven has been aired in the course of the controversy. My new book, Radical-in-Chief, extensively treats Piven’s influence on contemporary leftist strategy, and on...

CUNY sociology professor Frances Fox Piven has found herself in the midst of a political crossfire for a work she published 45 years ago. Piven, along with husband Richard Cloward published a work in the 1960s that now forms the crux of the attacks on the Obama administration from The Glenn Beck Program, and now Piven is speaking out against Glenn Beck and Fox News for death threats she has received via email since becoming a major character in Beck’s narrative. “Of course he’s not accurate,” Piven argues in a video interview released to counter claims made on Beck’s program...

Using borrowed money for a band-aid bailout of the economy should seem backwards to most people. However, it likely is a planned strategy to promote radical change. Those naively believing that President Obama is simply rewarding his far-left base, and will then move to the political center, must wise up. The assumption that Obama will need the nation to prosper in order to protect the 2010 mid-term election incorrectly assumes that he esteems free market capitalism. He does not. Rather than win through superior ideas and policies, the Democrat plan for success in the mid-term elections is to win by...

"Whether by design or incompetence, the Cloward-Piven Strategy lives. Named after two leftist professors at Columbia University, the scheme calls for overwhelming government obligations to the point of collapse, therefore providing an excuse for a radical government takeover of the whole economy. Three news stories yesterday show the Cloward-Piven day of reckoning is creeping perilously closer..."

The late sociologist Richard Cloward, was together with his wife, Frances Fox Piven, the originator of the famous Cloward Piven Strategy. Allegedly adopted by ACORN; and other groups on the left, the strategy involved deliberately loading as many people as possible onto state welfare rolls, to the point of the system was bankrupted. Then the Federal Government would be forced to step in to take over local welfare provision. According to Democratic Socialists of America's Democratic Left of Fall 2001, page 17; In 1966, Richard helped found the National Welfare Rights Organization, the protest movement of poor women. Its goal...

Long considered a tool for fomenting socialist revolution in America, the "Cloward-Piven Strategy" was a sociopolitical theory developed by left-wing ivory tower-dwellers Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. I'm sure the foil hat-wearing adherents of this line of thinking will complain here about my oversimplification of the plan and general lack of nuance, but basically, it seeks to undermine the (American) government by overloading said government with dependents needing welfare. Apparently, this will force the government into recognizing that there are a lot of dependents out there (artificially created, no doubt), which would inevitably lead to the United States' government...

Many commentators on the U.S. left have tried to minimize the significance and importance of the Cloward-Piven Strategy, made famous by writer James Simpson and TV personality Glenn Beck. According to Simpson and Beck, Columbia University sociologists, husband and wife team Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, devised a strategy in the early 1960s, to crash the U.S. economy and bring on socialist revolution by deliberately overloading state welfare rolls to the point of bankruptcy. Many on the left regard this hypotheses as gross exaggeration at best, deliberate misrepresentation at worst. [caption id="attachment_732" align="aligncenter" width="404" caption="Richard A. Cloward"][/caption] Cloward and...

Barack Obama and Congressional Democrats are deliberately and unapologetically engaging in economic sabotage; simultaneously targeting numerous sectors of the American economy using orchestrated systemic crisis in an effort to overwhelm the U.S. economy and effect the destruction of capitalism and America from within. By using the Cloward-Piven Strategy to promote economic and social change through the exploitation of misfortune, national crisis and disorganization the Left is advancing government as the tool for reorganization. The tactics and intended consequences of the Obama administration include: Strategically planned “crises” to systematically takeover private industry. Flooding government with impossible financial burdens until the debt...

While ACORN has earned much of the scorn of the press and public in recent months, its voter registration arm, Project Vote, is actually the entity that has been conducting the questionable voter registration drives. Project Vote has been accused of voter registrations fraud in more than a dozen states. Its parent group ACORN, along with a staff member, are scheduled to be tried for fraud in Nevada in a matter of days. Recently, ACORN was nailed under the RICO Act in Ohio and ordered to never come back to the state. More importantly, the settlement also said ACORN couldn’t...

In Red Ink Rising: A Call to Action to Stem the Mounting Federal Debt, The Peterson-Pew Commission on Budget Reform calls on policy makers to stabilize the national debt through a six-step plan. Crafted over the past year by former heads of the CBO, OMB, GAO, and the congressional budget committees, the plan reflects a bipartisan approach to avoiding the tremendous global risks of America's expanding debt, without destabilizing the economic recovery. Red Ink Rising is the first of two major reports to be released by the commission.

The president was in the enemy camp Tuesday night — at least that's what those on the left are saying about Obama's speech at West Point. Enemy camp? They also added that it was a "strange venue" for the speech. Where should it have been? At ACORN? SEIU? But the left may be onto something because that crowd did not look... how should I say it? Thrilled? The cameras even caught one cadet falling asleep. And they had pretty good reason to be annoyed. After the president apologized (again) for America's mistakes; blamed Bush for everything that's gone wrong; bragged...