Cloward Piven Strategy

I was watching In Depth on C-SPAN this past Sunday.  It featured a three hour interview (well worth your time if you have three hours to spare) with author and blogger Michelle Malkin.  Either she or one of the call in questioners mentioned the Cloward-Piven Strategy.  I'd never heard of it, so I Googled it last night.  I was amazed at what I learned.  It is based on an article entitled The Weight of the Poor, written by two leftist sociologists at Columbia University in 1966, and published in The Nation .  Their idea was to destroy capitalism by creating an artificial crisis based on welfare policy.  Their premise was that despite the large numbers of welfare recipients, there were an equal or greater number of people who were eligible for welfare but were not collecting.  By mobilizing those people to register for welfare benefits, they hoped to overwhelm the system, bankrupt local agencies, and create chaos that would cause local governments to seek federal help, ultimately leading to a socialized system that guaranteed a living income for all.  Sound familiar?  I believe we are seeing this happening in California today. Some authors credit this strategy with bankrupting New York City in 1975. 

For a more thorough discussion of Cloward-Piven, check links here and here.  Pretty scary.  A word of warning.  Most of the information I found on this subject came from two source websites.  American Thinker, and Discover the Networks.  Both are right wing in point of view, and a bit fringe in their tone.  So consider this viewpoint with the proper level of skepticism. 

Would I be a conspiracy theorist if I admitted that I think the way Obama and the Democrats are managing the economy supports a view that they are intentionally trying to destroy the capitalist system in this country to make way for socialism?


Jess