August 2021

Repeating the Words of Cloward and Piven

If you are even a casual student of history you will have noticed that certain government functions in the United States have changed quite a bit in the last 50 years.  Our system of government appears not to be able to function as it should. 

Have you heard of Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven?  These two persons were Columbia University sociologists who developed the theory that the system of capitalism could be destroyed by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.​

After the 1965 riots in Watts in Los Angeles, 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. The collapse of the welfare system 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.

Saul Alinsky's books Reveille For Radicals (1946) and Rules for Radicals (1971) were the early inspiration for Cloward and Piven.  One of Alinsky's rules was "Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules."  This means that when a society is forced to honor every word of every law and statute and every Judeo-Christian moral tenet and every implicit promise of the liberal social contract, human agencies will always fall short.  Therefore, the country's failure to live up to its rule book can be used to discredit it altogether and replace the capitalist "rule book" with a socialist one. 

Is our system being flooded in 2021?  Look at our southern border.  Joe Biden has opened the border and we have people from over 100 countries entering the country.  Where are they going?  They are being bussed all over the country.  They will be eligible for welfare, medical and education benefits.  Many of them have Covid which is not stopping them from being dispersed throughout the country.

Ultimately, local communities will be under pressure to provide for these people and of course the federal government will continue to print money to pay for many of these services. In fact,

Cloward and Piven is also used for the destabilization of state and federal programs.

Local governmental agencies are constantly looking at ways to tax the public in order to solve all social problems.  Rarely, does anyone come up with different ways to solve problems. This is why it is very important that Sonoma County citizens pay close attention to what is going on in their towns and their county especially in regards to how and for what money is being spent.