Posted on 11/02/2009 9:42:29 AM PST by Fighting Irish
Is THIS where Obama is taking the country?
( snip )
The strategy
Cloward and Piven’s article is focused on forcing the Democratic Party, which in 1966 controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress, to take federal action to help the poor. They argued that full enrollment of those eligible for wellfare “would produce bureaucratic disruption in welfare agencies and fiscal disruption in local and state governments” that would “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 constrained to advance a federal solution to poverty that would override local welfare failures, local class and racial conflicts and local revenue dilemmas.”[2] 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.”
Focus on Democrats
The authors pinned their hopes on creating disruption within the Democratic Party. "Conservative Republicans are always ready to declaim the evils of public welfare, and they would probably be the first to raise a hue and cry. But deeper and politically more telling conflicts would take place within the Democratic coalition," they wrote. "Whites – both working class ethnic groups and many in the middle class – would be aroused against the ghetto poor, while liberal groups, which until recently have been comforted by the notion that the poor are few... would probably support the movement. Group conflict, spelling political crisis for the local party apparatus, would thus become acute as welfare rolls mounted and the strains on local budgets became more severe.”[3]
Michael Reisch and Janice Andrews wrote that Cloward and Piven "proposed to create a crisis in the current welfare system – by exploiting the gap between welfare law and practice – that would ultimately bring about its collapse and replace it with a system of guaranteed annual income. They hoped to accomplish this end by informing the poor of their rights to welfare assistance, encouraging them to apply for benefits and, in effect, overloading an already overburdened bureaucracy."[4]
Reception
Historian Robert E. Weir argues that the original goal of the strategy was to bring about a crisis in the welfare system that would require radical reforms.[5] A major article in the New York Times in 1970 investigated the welfare system and discussed the impact of the Cloward–Piven strategy.[6] Howard Phillips, chairman of the Conservative Caucus, was quoted in 1982 as saying that the strategy could be effective because "Great Society programs 'had created a vast army of full-time liberal activists whose salaries are paid from the taxes of conservative working people.".[7] Robert Chandler claimed, "The socialist test case for using society's poor and disadvantaged people as sacrificial “shock troops,” in accordance with the Cloward–Piven strategy, was demonstrated in 1975, when new prospective welfare recipients flooded New York City with payment demands, which may have contributed to the bankrupting of the state government."[8] Other observers credit the city's bankruptcy to the mismanagement caused by politics, encouraging "frequently maturing short-term debt that left officials constantly scrambling to pay off loans"[9]
Sorry guys. The above was entered partly incorrect however I did adjust the source url.
I’m sorry my mistake I thought the tagline was “coward-driven”
The real purpose of this was just as Gramsci envisioned back in the early 1900s: demoralization, destabilization, ‘normalization’.
In other words, corrupt and crash the operating system of freedom and reboot the country under American Communist Tyranny 1.0
only it seems the authors felt that any such reform coming out of a collapse could move in only one direction, towards Socialism. They may prove to be wrong about that....
Yes, that is a big part of his strategy but not all of it. However, it all leads to the same end, Communist tyranny.
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