Cloward and Pivens - The Community Organizer's Play Book

This is one of the most important pieces I have presented on the Vigilance Project. I must give credit to Glenn Beck for bringing Cloward and Pivens out of the shadows and to Discoverthenetworks.org for assembling so much information on groups and people that would prefer to remain hidden from view. This is long but please read it in its entirety. Trust me; you will understand why when you reach the end. This is where all the loose strings begin to merge and the fabric of what is happening starts to take shape.

First proposed in 1966 and named after Columbia University sociologists Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, the "Cloward-Piven Strategy" is designed to create conditions that will lead to the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, eventually driving society into crisis and economic collapse.

Cloward and Piven published an article titled "The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty" in the May 2, 1966 issue of “The Nation”. Following its publication, The Nation sold an unprecedented 30,000 reprints. Activists clamored over the "crisis strategy" or "Cloward-Piven Strategy," as it is now called. Many saw this as an ultimate weapon for the radical’s arsenal.

In their 1966 article, Cloward and Piven claimed that the ruling classes used welfare to weaken the poor and that through providing a meager social safety net; the rich only sought to prevent rebellion. Poor people can advance only when "the rest of society is afraid of them," Cloward told The New York Times in 1970. Cloward and Pivens wrote: Rather than placating the poor with government hand-outs, 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 this rebellion would be to expose the inadequacy of the welfare state. Cloward-Piven's early promoters named radical organizer Saul Alinsky as their inspiration; yes, the same Alinsky that Obama taught his students about in College. "Make the enemy live up to their 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 replace the capitalist "rule book" with a socialist one.

Cloward and Piven noted that the number of Americans barely surviving on welfare probably represented less than half of those that were technically eligible for full benefits. They proposed a "massive drive to recruit the poor onto the welfare rolls." Cloward and Piven postulated that if even a fraction of the potential welfare recipients demanded their entitlements; it would bankrupt the system. The result would be "a profound financial and political crisis" that would create "powerful forces … for major economic reform at the national level.

The “Strategy” called for "cadres of aggressive organizers" to use "demonstrations to create a climate of militancy." Intimidated by threats of black violence, politicians would appeal to the federal government for help. Carefully orchestrated media campaigns, carried out by friendly, left wing journalists, would float the idea of "a federal program of income redistribution," in the form of a guaranteed living income for all; working and non-working people alike. Local officials would grasp at this idea for relief from the chaos and they would apply pressure on Washington to implement it. With every major city erupting into anarchy, Washington would have to act.

This “Trojan Horse” movement would seem to have the purpose of providing material help to the needy while concealing the real objective of drafting poor people into service as revolutionary soldiers in order to jam the bureaucratic machine and bring the system to a complete halt. Fear, chaos, violence and economic collapse would all be part of such a breakdown forcing society into radical change. That was the theory.

Cloward and Piven recruited a militant black organizer named George Wiley to lead their new movement. In the summer of 1967, Wiley founded the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO). His tactics closely followed the recommendations set out in the strategy. His followers invaded welfare offices across the United States, bullying social workers and loudly demanding every penny to which the law "entitled" them. By 1969, NWRO claimed a paid membership of 22,500 families, with 523 chapters across the nation. Curiously enough, Wade Rathke was an organizer for the NWRO before moving on to found ACORN and SEIU. What a coincidence!

The New York Times commented on Wiley’s efforts: “These methods proved effective”. "The flooding succeeded beyond Wiley's wildest dreams," wrote 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 moderate economic conditions. 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 result of its massive welfare spending, New York City was forced to declare bankruptcy in 1975 and the entire state of New York nearly went down with it. The Cloward-Piven strategy had proved its effectiveness.

The Cloward-Piven strategy depended on surprise. Once society recovered from the initial shock, the backlash began. New York's welfare crisis horrified America, giving rise to a reform movement which culminated in the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which imposed time limits on federal welfare, along with strict eligibility and work requirements. Surprisingly, both Cloward and Piven attended the White House signing of the bill as guests of President Clinton.

Cloward and Piven never again revealed their intentions as openly as they had in their 1966 article. Even so, their activism in subsequent years continued the tactic of attempting to overload the system. When the public caught on to their welfare scheme, Cloward and Piven simply moved on, applying pressure to other areas of the bureaucracy that appeared to have had weaknesses.

In 1982, devoted followers of the Cloward-Piven strategy founded a new "voting rights movement," which claimed to take up the unfinished work of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Like ACORN, the organization that spear-headed this campaign, the new "voting rights" movement was led by veterans of George Wiley's welfare rights crusade. Its flagship organizations were Project Vote and Human SERVE, both founded in 1982. Project Vote is an ACORN front group, launched by former NWRO organizer and ACORN co-founder Zach Polett. Human SERVE was founded by Richard A. Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, along with another former NWRO organizer named Hulbert James.

ACORN, Project Vote and Human SERVE, lobbied energetically for the so-called Motor-Voter law, which Bill Clinton signed into law in 1993. The Motor-Voter bill is largely responsible for swamping the voter rolls with invalid voter registrations signed in the name of deceased, ineligible or non-existent people, opening the door to the unprecedented levels of voter fraud and "voter disenfranchisement" claims that followed in subsequent elections.

The new "voting rights" coalition combines mass voter registration drives, typically featuring high levels of fraud, with the intimidation of election officials through frivolous lawsuits, unfounded charges of "racism" and "disenfranchisement," and direct action street protests. Just as they swamped America's welfare offices in the 1960s, Cloward-Piven clones 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 as 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 Soros’s support, the Cloward-Piven strategy continues to provide a blueprint for some of the Left's most ambitious campaigns.

So what do we actually have here? A strategy concocted by two radial sociologists designed to cripple the U.S. economy and force their idea of social justice on an unwitting society. Cloward-Piven follower, George Wiley, forms NWRO to test the theory which ultimately bankrupts New York City. Former NWRO organizers Wade Rathke and Zach Polett form ACORN to continue the strategy on a national level. Zach Polett goes on to form ACORN front group “Project Vote” in an effort to use the same tactics on the electoral system in the United States to steer future elections and to insure that election results are so tainted that the electoral process in America is disrupted.

But wait! There’s more! The Cloward-Piven strategy worked so well that the next level of radicals, many of which work in or have direct access to the White House and seek a single, unified, one world socialist government, have latched onto these principals to sow the seeds of America’s final hours. In fact, at least part of the push to enact a universal healthcare system in this country is linked to efforts to further disrupt our financial security and to nudge America into an acceptance of more, and even larger, socialist programs to prepare them for “the plunge”.

George Soros is one of the major figures in this conspiracy and has billions behind him to put it in play. His direct funding supports groups that continue to chip away at our current social programs to further the successes of Cloward and Piven. His Open Society Institute leads a world wide effort to export this strategy abroad for all the same reasons. Among other projects, Cloward and Piven’s own group HumanServe, is very active in (get this) Lebanon and Israel. Nothing fishy about that…right?

George Soros supports groups that in turn, support the Congressional Progressive Caucus. The group “Shadow Party” was conceived and organized principally by George Soros, Hillary Clinton and Harold McEwan Ickes. It consists of more than five-dozen unions, activist groups, and think tanks. Their primary function is to insure the continued election of radicals to the United States government; the same radicals that were originally brought to power by Project Vote and other Soros funded voting rights groups. Do you still think this is all far fetched? An internet search can uncover most of these links and you can follow the strings from one to another to another until the web is visible.

Paul

Who is Saul Alinsky?

MSNBC’s Chris Mathews calls him “one of our heroes from the past”; Barack Obama taught his theories in college; Hillary Clinton even wrote her college thesis about him. So who is Saul Alinsky and why should we be suspect of anyone that doesn’t grimace at the mention of his name?

Saul Alinsky was born to Russian-Jewish parents in Chicago in 1909, and while he never had clear associations to any political party but instead, as Alinsky biographer David Horowitz puts it, became an avatar of the post-modern left. Alinsky was a Communist/Marxist fellow-traveler who helped establish the dual political tactics of confrontation and infiltration familiar to anyone that lived through the 1960s.

His tactics have remained central to all subsequent revolutionary movements in the United States. He identified a set of very specific rules that ordinary citizens could follow, and tactics that ordinary citizens could employ, as a means of gaining public power. Alinsky, in essence, created a blueprint for revolution under the banner of "social change" that is the main underpinning for modern Progressives. His motto was, “The most effective means are whatever will achieve the desired results” which is little more than a rewording of the Marxist doctrine that the ends justify the means.

Alinsky studied criminology as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, during which time he became friendly with Al Capone and his mobsters. Ryan Lizza, senior editor of The New Republic, offers a glimpse into Alinsky’s personality: “Charming and self-absorbed, Alinsky would entertain friends with stories -- some true, many embellished -- from his mob days for decades afterward. He was profane, outspoken, and narcissistic, always the center of attention despite his tweedy, academic look and thick, horn-rimmed glasses.

According to Lizza: "Alinsky was deeply influenced by the great social science insight of his times, one developed by his professors at Chicago: that the pathologies of the urban poor were not hereditary but environmental. This idea, that people could change their lives by changing their surroundings, led him to take an obscure social science phrase—‘the community organization’--and turn it into, in the words of Alinsky biographer Sanford Horwitt, ‘something controversial, important, even romantic.’ His starting point was a near-fascination with John L. Lewis, the great labor leader and founder of the CIO. What if, Alinsky wondered, the same hardheaded tactics used by unions could be applied to the relationship between citizens and public officials?"

After completing his graduate work in criminology, Alinsky went on to develop his concept of mass organization for power. In the late 1930s he gained notoriety as a master organizer of the poor when he organized the “Back of the Yards” area in Chicago, an industrial and residential neighborhood on the Southwest Side of the city. In 1940 Alinsky established the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), through which he and his staff helped “organize” communities not only in Chicago but throughout the United States. IAF remains an active entity to this day. Its national headquarters are located in Chicago, and it has affiliates in the District of Columbia, twenty-one separate states, and three foreign countries (Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom) which only lends credence to the notion that the ultimate goal of Progressives is the globalization of politics and the unification of the world under a single, socialist style government.

In the Alinsky model, “organizing” is a cleaner, less threatening word for “revolution”. Not just any revolution but a wholesale revolution whose ultimate objective is a systematic cultivation of power by a supposedly oppressed segment of the population and the radical transformation of America’s social and economic structure. Isn’t it curious that Barack Obama chose the phrase that we were “five days away from fundamentally changing the United States” just before the 2008 election?

The goal, according to Alinsky, is to create enough public discontent, moral confusion, and outright chaos to spark the social upheaval that Marx, Engels, and Lenin predicted; a revolution whose foot soldiers view America’s Capitalist system as fatally flawed and wholly unworthy of salvation. Thus, the theory goes, the people will settle for nothing less than the current system’s complete collapse which would be followed by an entirely new system built upon its ruins. Toward that end, they will be apt to follow the lead of charismatic radical organizers who project an aura of confidence and vision, and who profess to clearly understand what types of societal “changes” are needed. Can you think of any “charismatic radical organizers that profess to clearly understand what types of societal “changes” are needed”? Naw….Obama just said he’s not an ideologue so that must be strictly coincidence….right?

We are concerned,” Alinsky elaborated, “with how to create mass organizations (like ACORN?) to seize power and give it to the people; to realize the democratic dream of equality, justice, peace, cooperation, equal and full opportunities for education, full and useful employment, health, and the creation of those circumstances in which men have the chance to live by the values that give meaning to life. We are talking about a mass power organization which will change the world … This means revolution.”

Alinsky did not mean the sweeping upheaval as was witnessed in 1917 Russia but instead, viewed revolution as a slow, patient process. The trick was to penetrate existing institutions such as churches, unions and political parties.” He advised organizers and their disciples to quietly, subtly gain influence within the decision-making ranks of these institutions, and to introduce changes from that platform. This was precisely the tactic of “infiltration” advocated by Lenin and Stalin who viewed the demoralization and eventual collapse of the West as best accomplished through a “Trojan Horse” tactic; rotting the mighty oak of Capitalism with a disease from within.

Alinsky stressed that organizers and their followers needed to take care when they first unveil their particular crusade for “change,” not to alienate the middle class with any type of defiant demeanor or menacing appearances that suggested radicalism or a disrespect for middle class mores and traditions. Alinsky added, “True revolutionaries do not flaunt their radicalism; They cut their hair, put on suits and infiltrate the system from within.” While his ultimate goal was nothing less than the “radicalization of the middle class,” Alinsky stressed the importance of “learning to talk the language of those with whom one is trying to converse.”

Alinsky taught that the organizer’s first task was to make people feel that they were wise enough to diagnose their own problems, find their own solutions, and determine their own destinies.

Alinsky explained, the organizer must employ such techniques as the artful use of “loaded questions designed to elicit particular responses and to steer the organization’s decision-making process in the direction which the organizer prefers. “Is this manipulation?” asked Alinsky. “Certainly!”; but to Alinsky, it was manipulation toward a desirable end: “If the common man had a chance to feel that he could direct his own efforts … that to a certain extent there was a destiny that he could do something about, that there was a dream that he could keep fighting for, then life would be wonderful living.

Alinsky viewed the role of the organizer as supremely important; a master manipulator, whose guidance was responsible for setting the agendas of the People’s Organization. “The organizer,” Alinsky wrote, “is in a true sense reaching for the highest level for which man can reach -- to create, to be a ‘great creator,’ to play God. Perhaps that explains the unbelievable statement Obama made during a campaign stop when he said that people would have an epiphany; that a light will descend upon on them and tell them that they must vote for Barack Obama.

I could go on for a week and still not be through with Alinsky but there is enough here to spell out who he was, what he believed in and the incredible parallels to the actions and words of Barack Obama. There are reams of information out there on Alinsky not to mention his books and writings that can complete the picture far better than I can. One thing I will add is that you must always remember that this man; this unapologetic radical, is the man that Barack Obama emulates; Hillary Clinton studied and Chris Mathews worships. If you do forget this, you forget not at your own peril, but at the peril of our nation.

Paul

Follow the Money

The healthcare bill is once again, being shaped and molded behind closed doors. There is really only one truth in Washington; large bills hide large lies. The bigger the bill, the bigger the lies and unfortunately, big lies in Congress usually come with an equally big price tag too. The healthcare bill, at nearly 2000 pages, is among the largest bills ever to worm its way through Congress and it is already known to be extremely costly. This bill is being shaped behind closed doors, we have not seen the “manager’s amendment” that was added at the last minute before the House vote and there are widespread rumors that there are at least attempts to hide the real cost of this monstrosity by shifting some of the costs to other bills or by using deceptive language in the amended copy.

Let’s see…the President said he will not sign a bill that is budget neutral. Well, budget neutral is Washington speak that simply means there will be enough tax increases and service cuts to pay for the proposal. Since it has an “adjusted” price tag of $1.2 trillion dollars, that equals an admission by Congress that this bill has $1.2 trillion dollars in tax increases and spending cuts; all taking place while the nation is in a deep recession. The truth is that independent analysis says that $1.2 trillion dollars is a laughable assessment and the actual cost over the first ten years will be closer to $3 trillion dollars.

At $3 trillion dollars, it will still be “budget neutral” because one of the big lies hidden in that 1900 pages is a tiny little provision that give Congress the authority to raise whatever funds are needed. What would happen to an economy that is already dangerously unstable if the Federal Government added another $2 trillion dollars in tax burdens? Washington is not totally crazy. They realize that raising taxes again would spell disaster in the next election so they will take the path of least resistance. More cuts to Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement rates which will shift the burden where it does now; to the State’s budgets and to the privately insured.

Why would Congress blatantly raise taxes when they can force the States to raise their own taxes to cover the shortfall created by federal reimbursement cuts? Why would Congress blatantly raise taxes when they can allow doctors and hospitals to raise their prices and shift the shortages to private insurance? Why jeopardize your own political future when you can jeopardize someone else’s?

Sometimes I think the indoctrination into the ranks of Congress began way back in grade school. The “spit-ball” assailant that watches in silence while another student is dragged out of the room to answer for a crime he did not commit. The stick ball player that breaks a window and hands the bat to the kid he wouldn’t even let play the game, then runs away before the grown ups show up. If you watched the old movies like “Mr. Smith goes to Washington” or “Meet John Doe”, the idea that there is honor in the halls of Capitol Hill is laughable. Congress has always been portrayed as a hive of villains that create law after law; not to benefit the American people but to handsomely reward that small circle of people that keep the politicians firmly ensconced as members of Congress for decades and decades.

This bill has hidden provisions that reward the latest generation of power brokers. Community organizers are suddenly transformed into part of our national healthcare system by providing funds to them for community outreach programs. A recent story taking place in Chicago showed public housing units, funded by Congress and run by these same community organizations. The units were neglected and maintenance personnel working for the property said that they didn’t even have the funds to buy steel wool to stuff in the rat holes that laced the property. Of course those same community groups had plenty of funds when it came to voter registration drives and to organize rallies to support the healthcare bill but somehow, the budget to care for the properties they acquired with Federal funds for the needy, is curiously empty.

The Unions get their rewards too; particularly, SEIU. A provision in the bill would provide funds to hospitals for nurse training provided that the hospital seeking the funds is a union hospital. Isn’t it funny that the SEIU covers healthcare workers and that SEIU’s Andy Stern is the most frequent visitor to the White House according to the recently released visitors list?

So let’s see if I have this right? The bill cuts $500 billion out of Medicare and raises taxes on people with good healthcare insurance plans, the wealthy, medical device manufacturers and through additional employer mandates in the name of healthcare reform but then provides cash subsidies to support the interests of SEIU and for programs administrated through the incredibly large number of ACORN affiliate organizations? The same SEIU whose members proudly wore their SEIU shirts while they viciously attacked a man in Ohio for attending a Tea Party Rally? The same ACORN that has just had their records and computers seized as part of an investigation by the Attorney General in Louisiana? The Same ACORN that has been labeled a criminal organization by a Congressional Committee?

Something is very wrong here and to be honest, I think that is what really needs investigation. Everyone is jumping on ACORN for their actions but I am a firm believer that fish stink from the head down. We have a healthy portion of the stimulus money that has not been spent yet. I honestly believe that the best place that money could be spent; the most effective action we could take to stimulate our economy and restore balance would be to use those funds for a complete and independent audit of every penny that has come out of Congress in the past ten years.

The Federal government only has the money that is has collected from us and with the way it is being spent; I will just go ahead and say “stolen” from us. It is a disgrace that billions are passed through for programs that average Americans easily recognize as ridiculous. Even though our economy is in serious trouble, the United States is still the largest stake holder in the United Nations, The International Monetary Fund, The World Bank plus a myriad of other international programs to create infrastructure and transportation systems in other nations around the globe. All of this is being spent without the knowledge of the American people or at least, without a complete understanding of what it does for the interest of America.

As the largest stake holder in the UN, we still have only one vote. As the largest stakeholder in the IMF and the Word Bank, all we get is an international bureaucracy to tell us what our financial obligations and policies should be. Infrastructure and transportation systems for foreign countries while our own infrastructure and transportation systems are crumbling? Why??? For all of the money this nation has spent in foreign and humanitarian aid, we have never bought a friend. In fact, all we have done is to create an ever growing population of those that wish us harm.

Paul

Cloward-Pivens- The Community Organizer Playbook

This is probably the most important piece I have presented on the Vigilance Project. I must give credit to Glenn Beck for bringing Cloward and Pivens out of the shadows and to Discoverthenetworks.org for assembling so much information on groups and people that would prefer to remain hidden from view. This is long but please read it in its entirety. Trust me; you will understand why when you reach the end. This is where all the loose strings begin to merge and the fabric of what is happening starts to take shape.

First proposed in 1966 and named after Columbia University sociologists Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, the "Cloward-Piven Strategy" is designed to create conditions that will lead to the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, eventually driving society into crisis and economic collapse.

Cloward and Piven published an article titled "The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty" in the May 2, 1966 issue of “The Nation”. Following its publication, The Nation sold an unprecedented 30,000 reprints. Activists clamored over the "crisis strategy" or "Cloward-Piven Strategy," as it is now called. Many saw this as an ultimate weapon for the radical’s arsenal.

In their 1966 article, Cloward and Piven claimed that the ruling classes used welfare to weaken the poor and that through providing a meager social safety net; the rich only sought to prevent rebellion. Poor people can advance only when "the rest of society is afraid of them," Cloward told The New York Times in 1970. Cloward and Pivens wrote: Rather than placating the poor with government hand-outs, 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 this rebellion would be to expose the inadequacy of the welfare state. Cloward-Piven's early promoters named radical organizer Saul Alinsky as their inspiration. "Make the enemy live up to their 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 replace the capitalist "rule book" with a socialist one.

Cloward and Piven noted that the number of Americans barely surviving on welfare probably represented less than half of those that were technically eligible for full benefits. They proposed a "massive drive to recruit the poor onto the welfare rolls." Cloward and Piven postulated that if even a fraction of the potential welfare recipients demanded their entitlements; it would bankrupt the system. The result would be "a profound financial and political crisis" that would create "powerful forces … for major economic reform at the national level.

The “Strategy” called for "cadres of aggressive organizers" to use "demonstrations to create a climate of militancy." Intimidated by threats of black violence, politicians would appeal to the federal government for help. Carefully orchestrated media campaigns, carried out by friendly, left wing journalists, would float the idea of "a federal program of income redistribution," in the form of a guaranteed living income for all; working and non-working people alike. Local officials would grasp at this idea for relief from the chaos and they would apply pressure on Washington to implement it. With every major city erupting into anarchy, Washington would have to act.

This “Trojan Horse” movement would seem to have the purpose of providing material help to the needy while concealing the real objective of drafting poor people into service as revolutionary soldiers in order to jam the bureaucratic machine and bring the system to a complete halt. Fear, chaos, violence and economic collapse would all be part of such a breakdown forcing society into radical change. That was the theory.

Cloward and Piven recruited a militant black organizer named George Wiley to lead their new movement. In the summer of 1967, Wiley founded the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO). His tactics closely followed the recommendations set out in the strategy. His followers invaded welfare offices across the United States, bullying social workers and loudly demanding every penny to which the law "entitled" them. By 1969, NWRO claimed a paid membership of 22,500 families, with 523 chapters across the nation. Curiously enough, Wade Rathke was an organizer for the NWRO before moving on to found ACORN and SEIU. What a coincidence!

The New York Times commented on Wiley’s efforts: “These methods proved effective”. "The flooding succeeded beyond Wiley's wildest dreams," wrote 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 moderate economic conditions. 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 result 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.

The Cloward-Piven strategy depended on surprise. Once society recovered from the initial shock, the backlash began. New York's welfare crisis horrified America, giving rise to a reform movement which culminated in the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which imposed time limits on federal welfare, along with strict eligibility and work requirements. Surprisingly, both Cloward and Piven attended the White House signing of the bill as guests of President Clinton.

Cloward and Piven never again revealed their intentions as openly as they had in their 1966 article. Even so, their activism in subsequent years continued the tactic of attempting to overload the system. When the public caught on to their welfare scheme, Cloward and Piven simply moved on, applying pressure to other areas of the bureaucracy that appeared to have had weaknesses.

In 1982, devoted followers of the Cloward-Piven strategy founded a new "voting rights movement," which claimed to take up the unfinished work of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Like ACORN, the organization that spear-headed this campaign, the new "voting rights" movement was led by veterans of George Wiley's welfare rights crusade. Its flagship organizations were Project Vote and Human SERVE, both founded in 1982. Project Vote is an ACORN front group, launched by former NWRO organizer and ACORN co-founder Zach Polett. Human SERVE was founded by Richard A. Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, along with another former NWRO organizer named Hulbert James.

ACORN, Project Vote and Human SERVE, lobbied energetically for the so-called Motor-Voter law, which Bill Clinton signed into law in 1993. The Motor-Voter bill is largely responsible for swamping the voter rolls with invalid voter registrations signed in the name of deceased, ineligible or non-existent people, opening the door to the unprecedented levels of voter fraud and "voter disenfranchisement" claims that followed in subsequent elections

The new "voting rights" coalition combines mass voter registration drives, typically featuring high levels of fraud, with the intimidation of election officials through frivolous lawsuits, unfounded charges of "racism" and "disenfranchisement," and direct action street protests. Just as they swamped America's welfare offices in the 1960s, Cloward-Piven clones 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 as 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 Soros’s support, the Cloward-Piven strategy continues to provide a blueprint for some of the Left's most ambitious campaigns.

So what do we actually have here? A strategy concocted by two radial sociologists designed to cripple the U.S. economy and force their idea of social justice on an unwitting society. Cloward-Piven follower, George Wiley, forms NWRO to test the theory which ultimately bankrupts New York City. Former NWRO organizers Wade Rathke and Zach Polett form ACORN to continue the strategy on a national level. Zach Polett goes on to form ACORN front group “Project Vote” in an effort to use the same tactics on the electoral system in the United States to steer future elections and to insure that election results are so tainted that the electoral process in America is disrupted.

But wait! There’s more! The Cloward-Piven strategy worked so well that the next level of radicals, many of which work in or have direct access to the White House and seek a single, unified, one world socialist government, have latched onto these principals to sow the seeds of America’s final hours. In fact, at least part of the push to enact a universal healthcare system in this country is linked to efforts to further disrupt our financial security and to nudge America into an acceptance of more, and even larger, socialist programs to prepare them for “the plunge”.

George Soros is one of the major figures in this conspiracy and has billions behind him to put it in play. His direct funding supports groups that continue to chip away at our current social programs to further the successes of Cloward and Piven. His Open Society Institute leads a world wide effort to export this strategy abroad for all the same reasons. Among other projects, Cloward and Piven’s own group HumanServe, is very active in (get this) Lebanon and Israel. Nothing fishy about that…right?

George Soros supports groups that in turn, support the Congressional Progressive Caucus. The group “Shadow Party” was conceived and organized principally by George Soros, Hillary Clinton and Harold McEwan Ickes. It consists of more than five-dozen unions, activist groups, and think tanks. Their primary function is to insure the continued election of radicals to the United States government; the same radicals that were originally brought to power by Project Vote and other Soros funded voting rights groups. Do you still think this is all far fetched? An internet search can uncover most of these links and you can follow the strings from one to another to another until the web is visible.

Tomorrow we will discuss the connections between Cloward-Pivens, the radical left and the new home of global Marxists, the environmental movement.

Paul