The Cloward-Piven Strategy

Although I was vaguely familiar with the Cloward-Piven strategy, I had not taken a good look at it until Neal Boortz tweeted a link to an article about it so I send out a well-deserved HatTip to the TalkMaster (@TalkMaster) for enlightening me. Neal’s link was to an article at a great site called DiscoverTheNetworks.Org, which has detailed information about the tangled web of left wing activist groups. From there I found another article written in October of last year by a retired Air Force colonel named Robert Chandler in which he analyzes the use of the Cloward-Piven strategy by individuals seeking to damage our financial system. These two articles are worth reading and forwarding to your thinking friends.

Named after Columbia University sociologists Richard Cloward and Frances Piven, the general idea behind the strategy is to intentionally overload the government system so much that it causes a crisis and collapses with a subsequent loss of confidence that Cloward and Piven hoped would “hasten the fall of capitalism.” I am reminded that my late father, a conservative, had a good but incredibly liberal friend who would bluntly argue that the cost of avoiding violent class warfare in America is the network of welfare programs that keep the poor complacent. As much as the idea disgusts me I have always thought that he was at least partly right. The article at DiscoverTheNetworks points out that the basic idea behind the Cloward-Piven strategy is to break the system in order to make the poor miserable enough to rebel. Not surprisingly to those of us watching the tactics being employed by the current ruling party, the author also mentions their connections to the radical Saul Alinsky, whose ideas apparently so inspired President Obama:

In their 1966 article, 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 able to advance exclusively when “the rest of society is afraid of them,” Cloward told The New York Times on September 27, 1970. Rather than placating the poor with government hand-outs, wrote Cloward and Piven, activists should work to sabotage and destroy the welfare system; the collapse of the welfare state would ignite a political and financial crisis that would rock the nation; poor people would rise in revolt; only then would “the rest of society” accept their demands.

The key to sparking this rebellion would be to expose the inadequacy of the welfare state. Cloward-Piven’s early promoters cited radical organizer Saul Alinsky as their inspiration. “Make the enemy live up to their (sic) own book of rules,” Alinsky wrote in his 1972 book Rules for Radicals. When pressed to honor every word of every law and statute, every Judaeo-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 substitute the capitalist “rule book” with a socialist one.

Saul Alinsky

Saul Alinsky

The author points out that the approach called for “cadres of aggressive organizers” to use “demonstrations to create a climate of militancy.” In fact, after Cloward and Piven recruited an organizer named George Wiley to do just that his group, the National Welfare Rights Organization, enjoyed such successes in New York that they did cause the desired collapse:

Regarding Wiley’s tactics, The New York Times commented on September 27, 1970, “There have been sit-ins in legislative chambers, including a United States Senate committee hearing, mass demonstrations of several thousand welfare recipients, school boycotts, picket lines, mounted police, tear gas, arrests – and, on occasion, rock-throwing, smashed glass doors, overturned desks, scattered papers and ripped-out phones.”These methods proved effective. “The flooding succeeded beyond Wiley’s wildest dreams,” writes Sol Stern in the City Journal. ”From 1965 to 1974, the number of single-parent households on welfare soared from 4.3 million to 10.8 million, despite mostly flush economic times. By the early 1970s, one person was on the welfare rolls in New York City for every two working in the city’s private economy.”As a direct happen of its massive welfare spending, New York City was forced to declare bankruptcy in 1975. The entire state of New York nearly went down with it. The Cloward-Piven strategy had proved its effectiveness.

These are precisely the same tactics employed by groups like ACORN to intimidate elected officials into acquiescing to their demands, such as forcing lending institutions to make loans to people with bad credit. The author argues that this approach requires surprise and that “when the public caught on to their welfare scheme, Cloward and Piven simply moved on, applying pressure to other sectors of the bureaucracy, wherever they detected weakness.” In fact, he points out that followers of the Cloward-Piven strategy successfully shifted their focus to our electoral system, with sinister results:

The new “voting rights” coalition combines mass voter registration drives -- typically featuring high levels of fraud -- with systematic intimidation of election officials in the form of frivolous lawsuits, unfounded charges of “racism” and “disenfranchisement,” and “direct action” (street protests, violent or otherwise). Just as they swamped America’s welfare offices in the 1960s, Cloward-Piven devotees now seek to overwhelm the nation’s understaffed and poorly policed electoral system. Their tactics set the stage for the Florida recount crisis of 2000, and have introduced a level of fear, tension and foreboding to U.S. elections heretofore encountered mainly in Third World countries. Both the Living Wage and Voting Rights movements depend heavily on financial support from George Soros’s Open Society Institute and his “Shadow Party,” through whose support the Cloward-Piven strategy continues to provide a blueprint for many of the Left’s most ambitious campaigns.



In an article at the Washington Times subtitled Using the poor to tear down capitalism, Col. Robert Chandler points this out and shows that it not only was proven viable when the approach successfully bankrupted New York City in the 70s but that our sub-prime financial crisis was engineered with these tactics:

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, bankrupting the government. As a consequence, New York state also teetered on the edge of financial collapse when the federal government stepped in with a bailout rescue.

The 2008 financial crisis has all of the earmarks of a Cloward-Piven strategy assault against the capitalist system. Stanley Kurtz of the Ethics and Public Policy Center recently explained that “community organizers” (1) “intimidate banks into making high risk loans to customers with poor credit,” (2) “occupy private offices, chant inside bank lobbies, and confront executives at their homes,” and, through these thuggish tactics, (3) compel “financial institutions to direct hundreds of millions dollars in mortgages to low-credit customers.” “In other words,” Mr. Kurtz explained during a presentation at the Hudson Institute’s Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civic Renewal, “community organizers help to undermine America’s economy by pushing the banking system into a sink-hole of bad loans.”

We have seen the results of the Cloward-Piven strategy, from the sub-prime crisis to [always left-wing] voter fraud in any swing state, these people are playing for keeps. Working in the trenches with these very people, attempting to destroy the system from within so that he could remake it, was our community organizer president. Saul Alinksy would be so proud.

We need to interrupt underestimating our opponents and the depths to which they will sink to force their statist ideology on Americans.