• • The Cloward-Piven Strategy is Alive and Well at the Border
• • Do not doubt the power of the Cloward-Piven strategy

The flood of immigrants at our borders today is neither an accident nor a surprise. It is an extension of the Cloward-Piven Strategy - the goal of which has been known for 50 years.

In a 1966 article in Nation, Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, sociology professors at Columbia University, wrote that capitalism should be collapsed by overloading the government with financial demands that could not be met.

The strategy is to collapse the financial system. The tactic is chaos. If a crisis does not exist, create one. The more chaos the better. The solution is always couched in empathetic words like "fair," "equal," "humane" and "just."

In 1967 Cloward and Piven founded the National Welfare Rights Organization to increase the numbers of people on the welfare rolls. Through a series of sit-ins, demonstrations, picket lines and occasional rock throwing, smashed glass and broken furniture they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. By the 1970's there was one person on welfare in New York City for every two working in the private sector. The city declared bankruptcy in 1975.

Project Vote was formed to organize the voter's rights movement to take up the "unfinished business" of the 1965 Voters Rights Act. ACORN and Human SERVE were formed to expand on the work of the National Welfare Rights Organization.

Those three organizations began lobbying for the Motor-Voter law to swamp our voter rolls with names that would never vote, but whose names would be on the rolls so others could vote in their stead. When President Bill Clinton signed the bill in 1993 Cloward and Piven were standing behind him.

ACORN is the most prominent of the organizations formed by Cloward and Piven. President Barack Obama was ACORN's lawyer. They have received millions of dollars from the federal government and charitable organizations for working on the census, voter registration, affordable housing and other organizing efforts.

ACORN's biggest success was in lobbying for the expansion of housing on behalf of the poor. The financial collapse of 2008 can be traced to government decisions. The Community Reinvestment Act of 1979 required banks to make loans in poor neighborhoods. Under pressure from the Clinton White House in 1999, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac lowered their credit standards on mortgages. Proposals by the Bush Administration to put Fannie and Freddie under closer supervision were opposed by Democrats in Congress.

In response to the chaos created by the financial meltdown, $2 trillion was spent saving Wall Street from their own bad decisions, covering the salaries of public union employees and expanding welfare and unemployment benefits. The shovel ready jobs that were promised are still undone so the Left demands more spending.

After dozens of ACORN employees were indicted on charges of voter fraud, their funding dried up and they were disbanded.

Today, in keeping with the Cloward-Piven Strategy, a new crisis is being manufactured by President Obama. There is chaos at the Southern border.

Two years ago the president stopped deportation efforts of young immigrants who came to the country illegally. We have had active programs in Mexico informing those who come to our country how to apply for food stamps. The welcoming word is out regarding illegal entry also.

The New York Times reported last week that an illegal immigrant youth said: "If you make it, they take you to a shelter and take care of you."

A mother with her child told Channel 5 News that the message being disseminated in their country is, "go to America with your child, you won't be turned away."

 

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Jonah Goldberg at National Review has a fine column today in which he dynamites the Obama talking point that our cross-border invasion is a flood of refugees from shocking new war-zone conditions in Central America, and has nothing to do with Obama's failure to enforce immigration laws.  After listing a series of dire headlines from various newspapers, describing bloody chaos in Columbia, Guatemala, and El Salvador, which would seem to buttress Obama's contention, Goldberg drops the bomb that they're all headlines from 1987 through 2007.

"And yet, over those two decades, we never saw anything like what we are seeing today," he observes.  "Something else is going on.  To be sure, this doesn't mean that the children at the border aren't fleeing horrible conditions, violence, and poverty.  But horrible conditions are not exactly new to Central America.  In other words, the new variable isn't what's happening down there, it's what's happened up here."

That's an important point, well made.  Obama's excuses were already laughable, given that everyone actually streaming across the border - most of them not unaccompanied minors - cheerfully and forthrightly states that they came looking for amnesty.  They're quite open about it.  They've been told, correctly, that if they make it across the border, they can stay.  They didn't hear that from opportunistic smugglers looking to drum up business; they heard it from American media, and from relatives already living in the United States, often illegally.

(And as Goldberg points out, the unaccompanied alien minors don't even have to get across the border - they just run up to Border Patrol agents and turn themselves in, making the Border Patrol into what I've described as a concierge service.  Jonah makes the same point by saying that responding to this crisis with a few more Border Patrol agents "is like adding more staff to the reception desk at a hotel.)

I've also heard growing rumbles in conservative media about how there has been no report of an exceptionally acute crisis in Central America that would produce an exodus of "refugees" comparable to the people streaming out of occupied Iraqi territory to escape from ISIS.  Rush Limbaugh's been asking where the telethons and media coverage of the history-altering crisis of the southern hemisphere have been.  Where are the telethons and charity benefit concerts?  Where are the earnest activists pressing for U.N. or U.S. intervention in a situation every bit as bad as any high-profile war-zone humanitarian disaster in the Middle East or Africa?  It's all a load of bull, and it's another black mark of shame against the American media that they didn't call Obama on it immediately, by simply doing their jobs and digging deep into these claims that the border crisis was caused primarily by conditions at the source, rather than the destination.

But I would respectfully disagree with Goldberg's brief dismissal of theories that Obama caused this crisis on purpose:

Some of my friends on the right think the border crisis is some grand political scheme of Obama's, that he in effect wants a border crisis. I think that's wrong. Buffeted by scandals and the growing realization by large swaths of the public that he is out of his depth, the last thing he needed was this tragic spectacle on the border.

But that doesn't mean this isn't a crisis of his making, triggered by his tendency to think politics first and policy second. In economic terms, he thought he could lower the price of a very valuable good - legal residence in the U.S. - without seeing any rise in the demand. These immigrants aren't fools. They're responding rationally to new information: If you make it past the border, you can stay. If you're a kid, all you have to do is make it to the border.

Jonah's colleague at National Review, Jim Geraghty, put out a "Morning Jolt" newsletter on this very same day, listing all of the terrible Obama stories that have dropped completely off news radar over the past couple of weeks.  Sections of his newsletter begin, "Hey, remember the VA?  Hey, remember Russia and Ukraine?  Hey, remember ISIS?  In related news... remember Syria?  Hey, remember ObamaCare?  Hey, remember the economy?"

That's an awful lot of wreckage Obama has been able to sweep off the front pages, while the border crisis consumes our attention, to the degree that the mainstream media is even willing to cover that.  I see no reason to think the border catastrophe has yet turned into a net media minus for Obama.  At the moment, the biggest sign that it's really hurting him has been a few of his loyal worshipers in the press (and Democrat Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas) warning him that he's skirting the edge of a "Katrina moment" by refusing to visit the border during his Texas fundraising swing.  Obama can deal with that any time he wants by actually visiting the border, something I think he is obviously reluctant to do, but it's media bleeding he can stop.  That's not true of the other stories fading into obscurity at the moment.  Let me put it this way: does anything about Obama's behavior over the past week suggest that he's losing sleep over how bad the illegal immigrant tidal wave is making him look?

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Rahm Emanuel cynically said, "You never want a crisis to go to waste." It is now becoming clear that the crisis he was referring to is Barack Obama's presidency.

Obama is no fool. He is not incompetent. To the contrary, he is brilliant. He knows exactly what he's doing. He is purposely overwhelming the U.S. economy to create systemic failure, economic crisis and social chaos -- thereby destroying capitalism and our country from within. 

Barack Obama is my college classmate (Columbia University, class of '83). As Glenn Beck correctly predicted from day one, Obama is following the plan of Cloward & Piven, two professors at Columbia University. They outlined a plan to socialize America by overwhelming the system with government spending and entitlement demands. Add up the clues below. Taken individually they're alarming. Taken as a whole, it is a brilliant, Machiavellian game plan to turn the United States into a socialist/Marxist state with a permanent majority that desperately needs government for survival ... and can be counted on to always vote for bigger government. Why not? They have no responsibility to pay for it.

-- Universal health care. The health care bill had very little to do with health care. It had everything to do with unionizing millions of hospital and health care workers, as well as adding 15,000 to 20,000 new IRS agents (who will join government employee unions). Obama doesn't care that giving free health care to 30 million Americans will add trillions to the national debt. What he does care about is that it cements the dependence of those 30 million voters to Democrats and big government. Who but a socialist revolutionary would pass this reckless spending bill in the middle of a depression?

-- Cap and trade. Like health care legislation having nothing to do with health care, cap and trade has nothing to do with global warming. It has everything to do with redistribution of income, government control of the economy and a criminal payoff to Obama's biggest contributors. Those powerful and wealthy unions and contributors (like GE, which owns NBC, MSNBC and CNBC) can then be counted on to support everything Obama wants. They will kick-back hundreds of millions of dollars in contributions to Obama and the Democratic Party to keep them in power. The bonus is that all the new taxes on Americans with bigger cars, bigger homes and businesses helps Obama "spread the wealth around."

-- Make Puerto Rico a state. Why? Who's asking for a 51st state? Who's asking for millions of new welfare recipients and government entitlement addicts in the middle of a depression? Certainly not American taxpayers. But this has been Obama's plan all along. His goal is to add two new Democrat senators, five Democrat congressman and a million loyal Democratic voters who are dependent on big government.

-- Legalize 12 million illegal immigrants. Just giving these 12 million potential new citizens free health care alone could overwhelm the system and bankrupt America. But it adds 12 million reliable new Democrat voters who can be counted on to support big government. Add another few trillion dollars in welfare, aid to dependent children, food stamps, free medical, education, tax credits for the poor, and eventually Social Security.