Discussion: Cloward–Piven Strategy

[SuBe]

I've been hearing about this a lot lately. The Cloward-Piven Strategy.

From Wikipedia:

The strategy

Cloward and Piven’s article is focused on forcing the Democratic Party, which in 1966 controlled the presidency and both houses of the United States Congress, to take federal action to help the poor. They argued that full enrollment of those eligible for welfare “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.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloward–Piven_strategy

Articles:

The Strategy was first elucidated in the May 2, 1966 issue of The Nation magazine by a pair of radical socialist Columbia University professors, Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. David Horowitz summarizes it as:

The 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.​

http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/02/the_clowardpiven_strategy_of_e.html
http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/09/barack_obama_and_the_strategy.html

First proposed in 1966 and named after Columbia University sociologists Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, 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.

http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6967

What do you think? Is our current Economic and Social conditions intentional? Are the Democrats following a generation-old Strategy that will ultimately cause the downfall of our great Republic?

Is this the reason the Democrats are so adamant on the adoption of Government controlled Healthcare?

 

[Marx]

The Democratic Party is not going to be the downfall of the United States. Shame on you SuBe.

 

[SuBe]

I'm asking the question as the Cloward-Piven Strategy was targeted for Democratic adoption in 1966. That was who Cloward and Piven was writing to. The Democrat Policies are enabling this Strategy.

 

[Heretic]

In related news: The Piven Strategy is to lose weight, get hair plugs and act like an unfunny *****ebag on tv.

 

[Nivek]

And to get Mercury Poisoning to get out of a badly reviewed performance.

 

[Kurosawa]

Think that is a little tinfoil hat there.

 

[Paradoxium]

I am in the "they are stupidly shooting their own foot" camp. Which actually seems worse. Because at least your theory shows some degree of intelligence and coordination.

Don't forget Kuro, the subprime crisis was called tinfoiled at one point as well.

 

[SuBe]

This was an Article written in 1966 by two respected Sociologists. How is that in the same vain as Lizard people?

 

[Kurosawa]

I'd say going massively in debt to Communist China and outsourcing jobs out of our country because companies despise paying people a decent wage is a bigger threat to the US than a watered down health care that will, at most, make Insurance companies be a little less *****ey. If even that.

Not to say that welfare wasn't pretty much a bad idea, no matter how well meant it was. What people need is jobs, and instead of healthcare, Obama should have made jobs his first priority.

 

[Paradoxium]

Welfare, medicare, public options and public jobs... all that don't mean **** if the streams that accumulates capital to tax from.... goes dry. Even the most left of left can appreciate and understand this. So yes, productive and economically sound jobs are important. But I am definitely not counting on that any time soon. At least nothing in the sustainable and long term sense.

 

[Kurosawa]

Me either.