Did Someone Just Say Cloward And Piven? Former SEIU Top Level Official Caught On Tape Conspiring To Implode America

Other than the fact that the left – liberals, progressive, Democrats, unions, the whole enchilada – are genuinely depraved un-American traitors, they really aren’t so bad.

Let me deal with a couple of possible objections before the article.  First of all, Steven Lerner hasn’t been “former” that long.  He left with Andy Stern, the man who visited Obama in the White House more than anyone else.  Second, this tactic that Lerner is describing isn’t merely some kind of a “theoretical” tactic.  It has been employed, and is continuing to be employed, by SEIU.

And it is the intimate association between Barack Obama and the SEIU (“Your agenda has been my agenda…”) that makes this really, really frightening.

I have on several occasions discussed Obama as having a Cloward and Piven agenda for America.

Politico Article Reveals Obama’s Cloward-Piven Strategy Backfiring

Obama’s Cloward-Piven Redistributionism Shaping The Future Collapse

Cloward-Piven Alive And Well: Progressives CONTINUE To Push For Destruction Of U.S. System

ObamaCare Is Cloward-Piven Strategy In Microcosm

Here it is.  And by that I mean both, “Here’s the article revealing Obama’s SEIU’s plan to destroy America,” and “Here’s Obama’s and the SEIU’s Cloward-Piven plan”:

CAUGHT ON TAPE: Former SEIU Official Reveals Secret Plan To Destroy JP Morgan, Crash The Stock Market, And Redistribute Wealth In America
Henry Blodget | Mar. 22, 2011, 9:44 AM

A former official of one of the country’s most-powerful unions, SEIU, has a secret plan to “destabilize” the country.  

The plan is designed to destroy JP Morgan, nuke the stock market, and weaken Wall Street’s grip on power, thus creating the conditions necessary for a redistribution of wealth and a change in government.

The former SEIU official, Stephen Lerner, spoke in a closed session at a Pace University forum last weekend.

The Blaze procured what appears to be a tape of Lerner’s remarks. Many Americans will undoubtedly sympathize with and support them. Still, the “destabilization” plan is startling in its specificity, especially coming so close on the heels of the financial crisis.

Lerner said that unions and community organizations are, for all intents and purposes, dead. The only way to achieve their goals, therefore–the redistribution of wealth and the return of “$17 trillion” stolen from the middle class by Wall Street–is to “destabilize the country.”

Lerner’s plan is to organize a mass, coordinated “strike” on mortgage, student loan, and local government debt payments–thus bringing the banks to the edge of insolvency and forcing them to renegotiate the terms of the loans.  This destabilization and turmoil, Lerner hopes, will also crash the stock market, isolating the banking class and allowing for a transfer of power.

Lerner’s plan starts by attacking JP Morgan Chase in early May, with demonstrations on Wall Street, protests at the annual shareholder meeting, and then calls for a coordinated mortgage strike.

Lerner also says explicitly that, although the attack will benefit labor unions, it cannot be seen as being organized by them. It must therefore be run by community organizations.

Lerner was ousted from SEIU last November, reportedly for spending millions of the union’s dollars trying to pursue a plan like the one he details here.  It is not clear what, if any, power and influence he currently wields. His main message–that Wall Street won the financial crisis, that inequality in this country is hitting record levels, and that there appears to be no other way to stop the trend–will almost certainly resonate.

A transcript of Lerner’s full reported remarks is below, courtesy of The Blaze. We have heard the tape, but we have not independently verified that the voice is Lerner’s.  You can listen to the tape here.

Here are the key remarks:

Unions are almost dead. We cannot survive doing what we do but the simple fact of the matter is community organizations are almost dead also. And if you think about what we need to do it may give us some direction which is essentially what the folks that are in charge – the big banks and everything – what they want is stability.

There are actually extraordinary things we could do right now to start to destabilize the folks that are in power and start to rebuild a movement.

For example, 10% of homeowners are underwater right their home they are paying more for it then its worth 10% of those people are in strategic default, meaning they are refusing to pay but they are staying in their home that’s totally spontaneous they figured out it takes a year to kick me out of my home because foreclosure is backed up

If you could double that number you would  you could put banks at the edge of insolvency again.

Students have a trillion dollar debt

We have an entire economy that is built on debt and banks so the question would be what would happen if we organized homeowners in mass to do a mortgage strike if we get half a million people to agree  it would literally cause a new finical crisis for the banks not for us we would be doing quite well  we wouldn’t be paying anything…

We have to think much more creatively. The key thing… What does the other side fear the most – they fear disruption. They fear uncertainty. Every article about Europe says in they rioted in Greece the markets went down

The folks that control this country care about one thing how the stock market goes what the bond market does how the bonuses goes. We have a very simple strategy:

• How do we bring down the stock market
• How do we bring down their bonuses
• How do we interfere with there ability to be rich…

So a bunch of us around the country think who would be a really good company to hate we decided that would be JP Morgan Chase  and so we are going to roll out over the next couple of months what would hopefully be an exciting campaign about JP Morgan Chase that is really about challenge the power of Wall Street.

And so what we are looking at is the first week in May can we get enough people together starting now to really have an week of action in New York I don’t want to give any details because I don’t know if there are any police agents in the room.

The goal would be that we will roll out of New York the first week of May. We will connect three ideas

• that we are not broke there is plenty of money
• they have the money  – we need to get it back
• and that they are using Bloomberg and other people in government as the vehicle to try and  destroy us

And so we need to take on those folks at the same time. And that we will start here we are going to look at a week of civil disobedience – direct action all over the city. Then roll into the JP Morgan shareholder meeting which they moved out of New York because I guess they were afraid because of Columbus.

There is going to be a ten state mobilization to try and shut down that meeting and then looking at bank shareholder meetings around the country and try and create some moments like Madison except where we are on offense instead of defense

Where we have brave and heroic battles challenging the power of the giant corporations. We hope to inspire a much bigger movement about redistributing wealth and power in the country and that labor can’t do itself that community groups can’t do themselves but maybe we can work something new and different that can be brave enough  and daring and nimble enough to do that kind of thing.

FULL TRANSCRIPT FROM THE BLAZE

SPEAKER: Stephen Lerner. Speaker at the Left Forum 2011 “Towards a Politics of Solidarity” Pace University March 19, 2011

Speaker Bio: Stephen Lerner is the architect of the SEIU’s groundbreaking Justice for Janitors campaign.  He led the union’s banking and finance campaign and has partnered with unions and groups in Europe, South American and elsewhere in campaigns to hold financial institutions accountable. As director of the union’s private equity project, he launched a long campaign to expose the over-leveraged feeding frenzy of private equity firms during the boom years that led to the ensuing economic disaster.

TRANSCRIPT:

It feels to me after a long time of being on defense that something is starting to turn in the world and we just have to decide if we are on defense or offense

Maybe there is a different way to look at some of theses questions  it’s hard for me to think about any part of organizing without thinking what just happened with this economic crisis and what it means

I don’t know how to have a discussion about labor and community if we don’t first say what do we need to do at this time in history what is the strategy that gives us some chance of winning because I spent my life time as a union organizer justice for janitors a lot of things

It seems we are at a moment where the world is going to get much much worse or much much better

Unions are almost dead we cannot survive doing what we do but the simple fact of the matter is community organizations are almost dead also and if you think about what we need to do it may give us some direction which is essentially what the folks that are in charge – the big banks and everything – what they want is stability

Every time there is a crisis in the world they say, well, the markets are stable.

What’s changed in America is the economy doing well has nothing to do with the rest of us

They figured out that they don’t need us to be rich they can do very well in a global market without us so what does this have to do with community and labor organizing more.

We need to figure out in a much more through direct action more concrete way how we are really trying to disrupt and create uncertainty for capital for how corporations operate

The thing about a boom and bust economy is it is actually incredibly fragile.

There are actually extraordinary things we could do right now to start to destabilize the folks that are in power and start to rebuild a movement.

For example, 10% of homeowners are underwater right their home they are paying more for it then its worth 10% of those people are in strategic default, meaning they are refusing to pay but they are staying in their home that’s totally spontaneous they figured out it takes a year to kick me out of my home because foreclosure is backed up

If you could double that number you would  you could put banks at the edge of insolvency again.

Students have a trillion dollar debt

We have an entire economy that is built on debt and banks so the question would be what would happen if we organized homeowners in mass to do a mortgage strike if we get half a million people to agree  it would literally cause a new finical crisis for the banks not for us we would be doing quite well  we wouldn’t be paying anything.

Government is being strangled by debt

The four things we could do that could really upset wall street

One is if city and state and other  government entities demanded to renegotiate their debt
and you might say why would the banks ever do it  – because city and counties could say we won’t do business with you in the future if you won’t renegotiate the debt now

So we could leverage the power we have of government and say two things  we won’t do business with you JP Morgan Chase anymore unless you do two things: you reduce the price of our interest  and second you rewrite the mortgages for everybody in the communities

We could make them do that

The second thing is there is a whole question in Europe about students’ rates in debt structure. What would happen if students said we are not going to pay.  It’s a trillion dollars. Think about republicans screaming about debt a trillion dollars in student debt

There is a third thing we can think about what if public employee unions instead of just being on the defensive  put on the collective bargaining table when they negotiate they say we demand as a condition of negotiation that the government renegotiate – it’s crazy that you’re paying too much interest to your buddies the bankers it’s a strike issue  – we will strike unless you force the banks to renegotiate/

Then if you add on top of that if we really thought about moving the kind of disruption in Madison but moving that to Wall Street and moving that to other cities around the country

We basically said you stole seventeen trillion dollars – you’ve improvised us and we are going to make it impossible for you to operate

Labor can’t lead this right now so if labor can’t lead but we are a critical part of it  we do have money we have millions of members who are furious

But I don’t think this kind of movement can happen unless community groups and other activists take the lead.

If we really believe that we are in a transformative stage of  what’s happening in capitalism

Then we need to confront this in a serious way and develop really ability to put a boot in the wheel  then we have to think not about labor and community alliances  we have to think about how together we are building something that really has the capacity to disrupt how the system operates

We need to think about a whole new way of thinking about this not as a partnership but building something new.

We have to think much more creatively. The key thing… What does the other side fear the most – they fear disruption. They fear uncertainty. Every article about Europe says in they rioted in Greece the markets went down

The folks that control this country care about one thing how the stock market goes what the bond market does how the bonuses goes. We have a very simple strategy:

• How do we bring down the stock market
• How do we bring down their bonuses
• How do we interfere with there ability to be rich

And that means we have to politically isolate them, economically isolate them  and disrupt them

It’s not all theory i’ll do a pitch.

So a bunch of us around the country think who would be a really good company to hate we decided that would be JP Morgan Chase  and so we are going to roll out over the next couple of months what would hopefully be an exciting campaign about JP Morgan Chase that is really about challenge the power of Wall Street.

And so what we are looking at  is the first week in May can we get enough people together starting now to really have an week of action in New York I don’t want to give any details because I don’t know if there are any police agents in the room.

The goal would be that we will roll out of New York the first week of May. We will connect three ideas

• that we are not broke there is plenty of money
• they have the money  – we need to get it back
• and that they are using Bloomberg and other people in government as the vehicle to try and  destroy us

And so we need to take on those folks at the same time

and that we will start here we are going to look at a week of civil disobedience – direct action all over the city
then roll into the JP Morgan shareholder meeting which they moved out of New York because I guess they were afraid because of Columbus.

There is going to be a ten state mobilization it try and shut down that meeting and then looking at bank shareholder meetings around the country  and try and create some moments like Madison except where we are on offense instead of defense

Where we have brave and heroic battles challenging the power of the giant corporations. We hope to inspire a much bigger movement about redistributing wealth and power in the country and that labor can’t do itself that community groups can’t do themselves but maybe we can work something new and different that can be brave enough  and daring and nimble enough to do that kind of thing.

People just can’t bring themselves to believe that their leaders are evil people with wicked agendas.  It’s that, “Oh, no, Chester isn’t molesting my little boy; he loves him” sort of thing.  It doesn’t seem to matter how much evidence there is, they just won’t believe it until it’s too late and the damage is done.  It wasn’t just German Aryans who bought Adolf Hitler; a lot of JEWS enthusiastically voted for him.  They thought, “This Antisemitic stuff is just party rhetoric; Hitler will put it aside as soon as he’s in power.”  And all of the adoring masses just refused to realize that they were anointing a monster and giving him their sons.

You can read and watch and listen to what the left has been trying to do for more than five decades.  That’s how old this Cloward and Piven agenda is.  You can listen to what the SEIU is trying to do.  It’s right in front of your face.  You can see all the evidence that Barack Obama is their man, and how committed he is to their agenda, in his own words.

What more do you need?  When will you wake up?

The union agenda is straight from hell.  And it has been for a very long time.  And Obama is very much a part of it.

Then there’s that someone somewhere who might be out there saying, “Gosh, I kind of agree with that Steven Lerner guy.  The rich have lots of money, and I’d like to have their money.  Maybe he isn’t so utterly depraved after all.”  Think about this: Steven Lerner of the SEIU is demonizing capitalism, the system which has been proven by 200 years of history to be the freest and most successful – not to mention most profitable and most powerful – system in the history of the entire world.

And what are these people basically suggesting as his model for replacement?  Something that oozed right out of the pits of hell into Karl Marx’s vile brain.  And from there it oozed into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, then the National Socialist German Workers Party, then the number-one-humanity-massacring People’s Republic of China, and from there to hellholes in Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia, etcetera.

These are truly bad, depraved, vile, wicked, evil people.  And if they get their way, not only will your children die lingering deaths, but you probably will too.

Obama’s Cloward-Piven Redistributionism Shaping The Future Collapse

There is a bizarre conspiracy afoot that most Americans are simply unwilling to comprehend, much less believe.

Obama and ‘Redistributive Change’
Forget the recession and the “uninsured.” Obama has bigger fish to fry.

By Victor Davis Hanson

The first seven months of the Obama administration seemingly make no sense. Why squander public approval by running up astronomical deficits in a time of pre-existing staggering national debt?

Why polarize opponents after promising bipartisan transcendence?

Why create vast new programs when the efficacy of big government is already seen as dubious?

But that is exactly the wrong way to look at these first seven months of Obamist policy-making.

Take increased federal spending and the growing government absorption of GDP.  Given the resiliency of the U.S. economy, it would have been easy to ride out the recession.  In that case we would still have had to deal with a burgeoning and unsustainable annual federal deficit that would have approached $1 trillion.

Instead, Obama may nearly double that amount of annual indebtedness with more federal stimuli and bailouts, newly envisioned cap-and-trade legislation, and a variety of fresh entitlements. Was that fiscally irresponsible? Yes, of course.

But I think the key was not so much the spending excess or new entitlements. The point instead was the consequence of the resulting deficits, which will require radically new taxation for generations. If on April 15 the federal and state governments, local entities, the Social Security system, and the new health-care programs can claim 70 percent of the income of the top 5 percent of taxpayers, then that is considered a public good — every bit as valuable as funding new programs, and one worth risking insolvency.

Individual compensation is now seen as arbitrary and, by extension, inherently unfair. A high income is now rationalized as having less to do with market-driven needs, acquired skills, a higher level of education, innate intelligence, inheritance, hard work, or accepting risk. Rather income is seen more as luck-driven, cruelly capricious, unfair — even immoral, in that some are rewarded arbitrarily on the basis of race, class, and gender advantages, others for their overweening greed and ambition, and still more for their quasi-criminality.

“Patriotic” federal healers must then step in to “spread the wealth.” Through redistributive tax rates, they can “treat” the illness that the private sector has caused. After all, there is no intrinsic reason why an auto fabricator makes $60 in hourly wages and benefits, while a young investment banker finagles $500.

Or, in the president’s own language, the government must equalize the circumstances of the “waitress” with those of the “lucky.” It is thus a fitting and proper role of the new federal government to rectify imbalances of compensation — at least for those outside the anointed Guardian class. In a 2001 interview Obama in fact outlined the desirable political circumstances that would lead government to enforce equality of results when he elaborated on what he called an “actual coalition of powers through which you bring about redistributive change.”

Still, why would intelligent politicians try to ram through, in mere weeks, a thousand pages of health-care gibberish — its details outsourced to far-left elements in the Congress (and their staffers) — that few in the cabinet had ever read or even knew much about?

Once again, I don’t think health care per se was ever really the issue. When pressed, no one in the administration seemed to know whether illegal aliens were covered. Few cared why young people do not divert some of their entertainment expenditures to a modest investment in private catastrophic coverage.

Warnings that Canadians already have their health care rationed, wait in long lines, and are denied timely and critical procedures also did not seem to matter. And no attention was paid to statistics suggesting that, if we exclude homicides and auto accidents, Americans live as long on average as anyone in the industrial world, and have better chances of surviving longer with heart disease and cancer. That the average American did not wish to radically alter his existing plan, and that he understood that the uninsured really did have access to health care, albeit in a wasteful manner at the emergency room, was likewise of no concern.

The issue again was larger, and involved a vast reinterpretation of how America receives health care.  Whether more or fewer Americans would get better or worse access and cheaper or more expensive care, or whether the government can or cannot afford such new entitlements, oddly seemed largely secondary to the crux of the debate.

Instead, the notion that the state will assume control, in Canada-like fashion, and level the health-care playing field was the real concern. “They” (the few) will now have the same care as “we” (the many). Whether the result is worse or better for everyone involved is extraneous, since sameness is the overarching principle.

We can discern this same mandated egalitarianism beneath many of the administration’s recent policy initiatives. Obama is not a pragmatist, as he insisted, nor even a liberal, as charged.

Rather, he is a statist. The president believes that a select group of affluent, highly educated technocrats — cosmopolitan, noble-minded, and properly progressive — supported by a phalanx of whiz-kids fresh out of blue-chip universities with little or no experience in the marketplace, can direct our lives far better than we can ourselves. By “better” I do not mean in a fashion that, measured by disinterested criteria, makes us necessarily wealthier, happier, more productive, or freer.

Instead, “better” means “fairer,” or more “equal.” We may “make” different amounts of money, but we will end up with more or less similar net incomes. We may know friendly doctors, be aware of the latest procedures, and have the capital to buy blue-chip health insurance, but no matter. Now we will all alike queue up with our government-issued insurance cards to wait our turn at the ubiquitous corner clinic.

None of this equality-of-results thinking is new.

When radical leaders over the last 2,500 years have sought to enforce equality of results, their prescriptions were usually predictable: redistribution of property; cancellation of debts; incentives to bring out the vote and increase political participation among the poor; stigmatizing of the wealthy, whether through the extreme measure of ostracism or the more mundane forced liturgies; use of the court system to even the playing field by targeting the more prominent citizens; radical growth in government and government employment; the use of state employees as defenders of the egalitarian faith; bread-and-circus entitlements; inflation of the currency and greater national debt to lessen the power of accumulated capital; and radical sloganeering about reactionary enemies of the new state.

The modern versions of much of the above already seem to be guiding the Obama administration — evident each time we hear of another proposal to make it easier to renounce personal debt; federal action to curtail property or water rights; efforts to make voter registration and vote casting easier; radically higher taxes on the top 5 percent; takeover of private business; expansion of the federal government and an increase in government employees; or massive inflationary borrowing. The current class-warfare “them/us” rhetoric was predictable.

Usually such ideologies do not take hold in America, given its tradition of liberty, frontier self-reliance, and emphasis on personal freedom rather than mandated fraternity and egalitarianism. At times, however, the stars line up, when a national catastrophe, like war or depression, coincides with the appearance of an unusually gifted, highly polished, and eloquent populist. But the anointed one must be savvy enough to run first as a centrist in order later to govern as a statist.

Given the September 2008 financial meltdown, the unhappiness over the war, the ongoing recession, and Barack Obama’s postracial claims and singular hope-and-change rhetoric, we found ourselves in just such a situation. For one of the rare times in American history, statism could take hold, and the country could be pushed far to the left.

That goal is the touchstone that explains the seemingly inexplicable — and explains also why, when Obama is losing independents, conservative Democrats, and moderate Republicans, his anxious base nevertheless keeps pushing him to become even more partisan, more left-wing, angrier, and more in a hurry to rush things through. They understand the unpopularity of the agenda and the brief shelf life of the president’s charm. One term may be enough to establish lasting institutional change.

Obama and his supporters at times are quite candid about such a radical spread-the-wealth agenda, voiced best by Rahm Emanuel — “You don’t ever want a crisis to go to waste; it’s an opportunity to do important things that you would otherwise avoid” — or more casually by Obama himself — “My attitude is that if the economy’s good for folks from the bottom up, it’s gonna be good for everybody. I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”

So we move at breakneck speed in order not to miss this rare opportunity when the radical leadership of the Congress and the White House for a brief moment clinch the reins of power. By the time a shell-shocked public wakes up and realizes that the prescribed chemotherapy is far worse than the existing illness, it should be too late to revive the old-style American patient.

— NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

The term, “Cloward-Piven strategy” resounds in Hanson’s article without having ever once been used:

In their 1966 article, Cloward and Piven charged that the ruling classes used welfare to weaken the poor; that by providing a social safety net, the rich doused the fires of rebellion. Poor people can advance only when “the rest of society is afraid of them,” Cloward told The New York Times on September 27, 1970. Rather than placating the poor with government hand-outs, wrote Cloward and Piven, 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.

An American Thinker article provides flesh to the concept:

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.

Cloward and Piven were inspired by radical organizer [and Hillary Clinton mentor] Saul Alinsky:

“Make the enemy live up to their (sic) own book of rules,” Alinsky wrote in his 1989 book Rules for Radicals. When pressed to honor every word of every law and statute, every Judeo-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. (Courtesy Discover the Networks.org)

Newsmax rounds out the picture:

Their strategy to create political, financial, and social chaos that would result in revolution blended Alinsky concepts with their more aggressive efforts at bringing about a change in U.S. government. To achieve their revolutionary change, Cloward and Piven sought to use a cadre of aggressive organizers assisted by friendly news media to force a re-distribution of the nation’s wealth.

In their Nation article, Cloward and Piven were specific about the kind of “crisis” they were trying to create:

By crisis, we mean a publicly visible disruption in some institutional sphere. Crisis can occur spontaneously (e.g., riots) or as the intended result of tactics of demonstration and protest which either generate institutional disruption or bring unrecognized disruption to public attention.

No matter where the strategy is implemented, it shares the following features:

1. The offensive organizes previously unorganized groups eligible for government benefits but not currently receiving all they can.
2. The offensive seeks to identify new beneficiaries and/or create new benefits.
3. The overarching aim is always to impose new stresses on target systems, with the ultimate goal of forcing their collapse.

Nobody wants to believe that a large and influential group of our leaders would want to create a catastrophe as a means of having an opportunity to impose their will upon an ensuing “super-government” that would necessarily have to arise from the ashes.  The concept strikes many as madness.

Only it’s happened too many times in just this century to label as “madness.”  It is, in fact, the goal of virtually every revolutionary movement.  You have to tear down the old in order to create the new.

Consider the fact that the leftist organizers of the 1960s – like Barack Obama’s friend and mentor William Ayers, who was instrumental in Obama’s early career and his run in politics – are very much still around and still profoundly shaping the leftist agenda.  Take Ayers’ Weather Underground co-founder Jeff Jones, whose Apollo Alliance wrote a big chunk of Obama’s stimulus package.  Take Tom Hayden (who endorsed Obama), leader of the leftist group Students for a Democratic Society.  He proclaimed in a landmark 1962 speech that the youth must wrest control of society from their elders, and that to that end universities had to be transformed into incubators of revolutionary “social action.”  And his calls to use any means necessary to achieve that “social action” – certainly including violence and force – colored and in fact defined the entire 60s leftist radicalism.  Hayden was one of the writers of the “Berkeley Liberation Program.”  Some highlights: “destroy the university, unless it serves the people”; “all oppressed people in jail are political prisoners and must be set free”; “create a soulful socialism”; “students must destroy the senile dictatorship of adult teachers.”  And his “community outreach” fomented horrific race riots.

These people are still dictating the agenda of the left today.  They were trying to fundamentally transform society then, and they are trying to fundamentally transform society today.  Only their tactics have changed; the goal remains the same.

You don’t think Barack Obama – who was in turn mentored by communist Frank Marshall Davis, by radical organizer Saul Alinsky, by terrorist William Ayers – (the link is to a CNN story demonstrating that Obama’s relationship to Ayers was MUCH deeper than Obama claimed) – doesn’t value these people and share their values?  Then, to put it very bluntly, you are a fool.  The words of our current president:

“To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully.The more politically active black students.  The foreign students.  The Chicanos.  The Marxist Professors and the structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.  We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets.  At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy.  When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet or set our stereos so loud that the walls began to shake, we were resisting bourgeois society’s stifling constraints.  We weren’t indifferent or careless or insecure.  We were alienated.”

But of course, Obama really wasn’t alienated, by his own statement.  He was a member of a community–a community of far-far-leftist radicals.

Also, of course “the more politically active black students” were the violent, racist, and criminal Black Panthers.

Obama was always about “change.”

You may not believe me now.  I understand that.  But hear this: it is my contention that things are going to get seriously bad in this country.  And that there are liberals, progressives, socialists (as Obama’s climate czar Carol Browner is), communists (as Obama’s ‘Green jobs czar’ Van Jones describes himself) – or whatever the hell these people want to call themselves – who are manipulating and riding the current times in order to take advantage of the future collapse.

Things didn’t have to get as bad as they’re going to get.  It certainly won’t be George Bush’s fault (all of Obama’s efforts to turn him into the current version of Emmanuel Goldstein to the contrary).  It is not George Bush’s fault that Barack Obama’s budget accumulated so far in 2009 exceeds all eight years of Bush’s combined deficits.  It’s not George Bush’s fault that we have seen historic and completely unsustainable levels of red ink under Barack Obama.  It’s not George Bush’s fault that Barack Obama is essentially truing to nationalize wide swaths of our economy, such as health care and energy.  It’s all on Obama.

Obama’s massive debt is creating serious worries about the future of the U.S. dollar.  We are forecasted to be paying a trillion dollars a year just in interest on the debt by 2019; and it will very likely be a lot more a lot sooner.

What’s going to happen then?

Well, let me tell you what the Cloward-Piven proponents believe will happen: they think the coming complete crash of our economic system will result in the complete takeover of the economy and the society by the state.  They think that as panicked and hungry people look around at the disaster big government created, they will have no choice but to turn to government for help.  They think that they will finally have the socialist utopia they always dreamed of but American independence and self-reliance would never allow.

If by some miracle in defiance of all the laws of economics Obama’s economic policy actually doesn’t kill our economy, Obama and Democrats will win big.  If, far more likely, Obama’s economic policy causes a crash of the entire system, liberals believe that Democrats will ultimately STILL win big.

You can call me crazy if you like.  But mark my words.

As you see things getting worse, and liberals using the complete and catastrophic failure of big government to justify even MORE and even BIGGER big government, what might seem crazy to you now will make a lot more sense.

Politico Article Reveals Obama’s Cloward-Piven Strategy Backfiring

Allow me to refresh your memories concerning the infamous Cloward-Piven strategy, which was the brainchild of two leftist professors to take total control of America by overwhelming its social support structures to create a “crisis”:

In their 1966 article, Cloward and Piven charged that the ruling classes used welfare to weaken the poor; that by providing a social safety net, the rich doused the fires of rebellion. Poor people can advance only when “the rest of society is afraid of them,” Cloward told The New York Times on September 27, 1970. Rather than placating the poor with government hand-outs, wrote Cloward and Piven, 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 sparking this rebellion would be to expose the inadequacy of the welfare state. Cloward-Piven’s early promoters cited radical organizer Saul Alinsky as their inspiration. “Make the enemy live up to their (sic) 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.

I genuinely believe that Barack Obama – a follower of Saul Alinsky as well as the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate when he belonged to it to go along with a long and deep relationship with leftist radicals – is pursuing a “heads we win, tails you lose” strategy. If the economy somehow miraculously picks up under all of this massive spending and even more massive debt, then Democrats win big and Republicans lose. If – far more likely – the economy crashes under its own massive weight due to hyperinflation as interest payments on the debt soar and the Obama Treasury devalues the currency by printing money, then a starving, terrified people will scream for help from their government. And Democrats will – in solving the “crisis” they themselves created – secure the pure-socialist totalitarian state they have always envisioned. Either way, Obama liberals believe they will win big.

Government by crisis is a tried and true fascist approach.  It is up to you to decide whether it is a coincidence or not that Barack Obama is using the same approach, as described by his Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel:

EMANUEL:  “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.  What I mean by that is it’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.  This is an opportunity. What used to be long-term problems — be they in the health care area, energy area, education area, fiscal area, tax area, regulatory reform area — things that we had postponed for too long that were long-term are now immediate and must be dealt with.  And this crisis provides the opportunity for us, as I would say, the opportunity to do things that you could not do before.”

Obama began his presidency by fearmongering a crisis to get his way.  He fearmongered the stimulus through the Congress, predicting terrifying scenarios if it failed and hyping claims that have turned out to be completely false if he got his way.  Republicans were completely shut out of the stimulus, and the legislation was rushed through Congress so quickly that not one single Representative or Senator had any chance to read the bill that Obama then took leisurely four days to sign.

There was just one problem: Cloward-Piven depended for its success upon a death by incrementalism, as vividly depicted by a frog placed in a pot of water.  If you put the frog in boiling water, it will leap out immediately.  But if you put the frog in cool water and gradually turn up the heat, you can literally cook the frog to death.  Obama’s problem is that he turned the heat up too fast for the American people, and they are now leaping out of the boiling cauldron he created for them.

Or, perhaps another illustration will do to depict the American people-as-frog:

Note that the article that follows is written from a clear liberal slant (e.g., “Then Obama lost control of the health care debate by letting Republicans get away with their bogus claims about “death panels.”). Nevertheless, the article clearly admits to the crisis-style mentality that Obama used to try to push through his entire agenda at once.

Obama’s Big Bang could go bust
By: Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei
August 21, 2009

Barack Obama’s Big Bang is beginning to backfire, as his plans for rapid, once-in-a-generation overhauls of energy, financial regulation and health care are running into stiff resistance, both in Washington and around the country.

The Obama theory was simple, though always freighted with risk: Use a season of economic anxiety to enact sweeping changes the public likely wouldn’t stomach in ordinary times. But the abrupt swing in the public’s mood, from optimism about Obama’s possibility to concern he may be overreaching, has thrown the White House off its strategy and forced the president to curtail his ambitions.

Some Democrats point to a decision in June as the first vivid sign of trouble for Obama. These Democrats say the White House, in retrospect, made a grievous mistake by muscling conservative Democrats in swing districts to vote for a cap-and-trade energy bill that was very unpopular among their constituents.

Many of those members were pounded back home because Democrats passed a bill Republicans successfully portrayed as a big tax increase on consumers. The result: many conservative Democrats were gun-shy about taking any more risky votes — or going out on a limb on health care.

The other result: The prospects for winning final passage of a cap-and-trade bill this year are greatly diminished. And, while most Democrats still predict a health care bill will pass this year, it is likely to be a shadow of what Obama once had planned.

“The majority-makers are the freshman and sophomores from conservative districts where there’s this narrative building about giveaways, bailouts and too much change at once,” said a top House Democratic strategist, who requested anonymity to discuss internal politics candidly. “There’s this big snowball building in those districts. That’s why those folks are so scared.”

David Axelrod, Obama’s political architect, said it was “very clear early in the transition” that Obama would have to attack a number of festering issues simultaneously.

“The times demanded it,” he said in an interview. “We didn’t have the luxury of taking things sequentially, year after year, and hoping we got there. That’s the reason that all these major issues had been deferred for decades: Change is hard.”

Axelrod said the president is “looking forward to an active fall” when he returns from next week’s vacation on Martha’s Vineyard, and is not as worried about the outlook as the denizens of Washington, where “every day is election day.”

But the “Big Bang” theory of governance, as some White House insiders called it, is not without risk and consequences.

By doing so much, so fast, Obama gave Republicans the chance to define large swaths of the debate. Conservatives successfully portrayed the stimulus bill as being full of pork for Democrats. Then Obama lost control of the health care debate by letting Republicans get away with their bogus claims about “death panels.” The GOP also has successfully raised concerns that the Obama plan is a big-government takeover of health care — and much of Middle America bought the idea, according to polls.

By doing so much, so fast, Obama never sufficiently educated the public on the logic behind his policies. He spent little time explaining the biggest bailouts in U.S. history, which he inherited but supported and expanded. And then he lost crucial support on the left by not following up quickly with new and stricter rules for Wall Street. On Friday, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman echoed a concern widely shared among leading liberals. “I don’t know if administration officials realize just how much damage they’ve done themselves with their kid-gloves treatment of the financial industry, just how badly the spectacle of government supported institutions paying giant bonuses is playing.”

By doing so much so fast, Obama jammed the circuits on Capitol Hill. Congress has a hard time doing even one big thing well at a time. Congress is good at passing giveaways and tax cuts, but has not enacted a transformative piece of social legislation since President Bill Clinton’s welfare reform of 1996. “There’s a reason things up here were built to go slowly,” said another Democratic aide.

By doing so doing so much, so fast, he has left voters — especially independents — worried that he got an overblown sense of his mandates and is doing, well, too much too fast. A Washington Post-ABC News poll published Friday found that independents’ confidence in Obama’s ability to make the right decisions had dropped 20 points since the Inauguration, from 61 percent to 41 percent.

Axelrod and others argue Obama had no choice but to tackle all of these issues at once. That might be true for a stimulus bill and the bank and auto bailouts — but that case is harder to make for energy and health care, which have been the focus of intense debate for decades past and probably will for decades to come.

Go-big-or-go-home isn’t the only theory of the case that a new president can adopt. The most promising alternative is to build public support over time by showing competence and success, then using that to leverage bigger things.

So imagine if Obama had focused on fixing the economy, and chosen presidential power over congressional accommodation and constructed his American Recovery and Reinvestment Act as a true, immediate stimulus without the pork and paybacks.

He then could have pushed through tougher regulation of financial institutions, making it clear people were paying for their sins, and would have a much harder time doing it again. This would have delighted the left and perhaps bought Obama more durable support among independents. Instead, the left thinks he’s beholden to investment banks, and much of the public sees no consequences for the financial mess.

Add in some serious budget cuts, and Obama would have positioned himself as a new kind of liberal with the courage to tame Washington and Wall Street, as promised. Under this scenario, Obama might be getting more credit for the economic recovery that appears to be under way. This would have positioned him to win health care reform starting next year — a mighty achievement, and clear vindication against the doubters. Some White House officials said they are skeptical of moving controversial bills in an election year, when lawmakers are often more timid.

White House officials say they never seriously considered a more incremental approach to the year, though they did privately discuss trying to get regulation of the financial sector done right after the stimulus bill. There was too much disagreement among Democrats at the time over how far to go with regulation to proceed.

If the current strategy fails, the same person who got much of the credit for the crisp first 100 days will get some of the blame: White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel. It was Emanuel who has strongly advocated the big-bang approach, declaring during the transition: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. Now, what I mean by that, it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do.”

The confidence of Obama’s aides was bolstered by their fresh memory that a similar approach had worked very effectively for then-President George W Bush after the Sept. 11 attacks. With the public on edge, Bush was able to enact restrictive policies under the banner of protecting American soil, and build an entire new department of government that voters otherwise might have opposed. The economic meltdown would be Obama’s Sept. 11 — the predicate for sweeping legislation that he wanted to enact anyway.

Just past halftime in his first year, the president has won passage of a long list of bills that the White House points to as proof of their approach. In addition to the stimulus, Obama signed major bills on tobacco, pay equity, children’s health insurance, national service and the mortgage rescue. If he gets health care and either energy or regulation this year, it would be hard to argue the big-bang plan wasn’t a success.

Former Rep. Lee Hamilton (D-Ind.), now president and director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, cautions that any verdict on Obama would be “kind of like judging a major surgical operation in the middle of the operation.”

With Obama reaching the defining season of his freshman year, Hamilton said the current agenda reminds him of the scale of the Great Society programs Congress was tackling when he came to Congress in 1965. “This president thinks big but I also think he acts pragmatically,” Hamilton said. “So many things in a congressional session come together at the last few hours, the last few weeks.”

But sometimes they just come undone.

Zachary Abrahamson contributed to this report.

A number of points of order: Politico says that “Congress…has not enacted a transformative piece of social legislation since President Bill Clinton’s welfare reform of 1996.” But Bill Clinton did not transform anything; it was the Republicans under the Contract with America who imposed the welfare reform of 1996 – and Bill Clinton was forced to sign the thing he subsequently took credit for.

Politico cannot stop itself from falling into blaming Republicans for their  health care demonizing.  But there is an admission that even before health care came up on Obama’s timetable, it was DEMOCRATS who were worried and frightened at the agenda: “There was too much disagreement among Democrats at the time over how far to go with regulation to proceed.” It would be nice if the mainstream media finally reported honestly and acknowledged that if health care doesn’t pass, it is because Democrats are worrying about their seats as an outraged electorate gets its revenge.

Another problem the Politico article glosses over is summed up in the statement: “By doing so much, so fast, Obama never sufficiently educated the public on the logic behind his policies.” But the issue isn’t that Obama never educated the public on the logic behind his policies; it’s that his policies don’t have any logic beyond the most superficial big-government liberalism that most Americans reject.  Other than the argument, “This is a naked power-grab intended to secure Democrat control for perpetuity,” there simply IS no argument.

There’s another point that the Politico article glosses over that emerges from the statement: “There’s a reason things up here were built to go slowly,” said another Democratic aide.” That reason is the Constitution.  We were never set up to be a fascist dictatorship or a totalitarian state disconnected from the deliberation of the people.  Our founders made us to be a nation of laws, and follow a tried-and-true process that would slow us down to avoid tyranny.

But liberals have trampled on the Constitution for years.  Too many leftist intellectuals regard it as the irrelevant product of a cadre of dead, white, sexist, slave-holding males.  Barack Obama has derided the Constitution as “a charter of negative liberties, says what the states can’t do to you, says what the federal government can’t do to you.” The Constitution becomes a problem for Obama.

We have the right to assemble, but the government is not obliged to transport us to protest sites.  We have the right to speak, but the government is not required to provide us with a megaphone or a platform.  The “negative liberties” allow us our basic freedoms while preserving our individual liberties and responsibilities.  Obama wants to fundamentally do away with the Constitution in order to impose an entirely different system which creates a mega-state that will have innumerable duties to take care of us.

If he succeeds, the America that the founding fathers created will officially cease to exist.  The nanny state isn’t in the Constitution, no matter how many penumbras and emanations liberal justices might claim to see in their crystal-ball-gazing.

As for the “death panels” being a bogus claim, do you want to know where the death panels are?  They are right here:

The whole damn maze of bureaucracy is a “death panel.”  Anyone who thinks that the government will be able to expand their government health care – which is already about to go bankrupt – to tens of millions more people, and save money doing it, is a fool.  They are people who cannot see the facts through their ideology.

The Cloward-Piven strategy appears to be having a problem due to Barack Obama’s arrogance and unwillingness to continue to use the system to “get there” gradually.

The only question, given the massive debts Obama has already accumulated – deficits that literally are more than every president has accumulated from George Washington to George W. Bush, combined – is whether the Cloward-Piven strategy will yet have its chance to work.  It might already be too late.  When you look at our real national debt of more than $100 TRILLION and realize that we cannot possibly repay it, if you have any sense you should get more than a little bit concerned that our leaders simply WILL NOT control their spending.

The Democrats have an endgame: when the system collapses, the panicked people will turn to the very government that created the calamity and demand that it take care of them.  And that is precisely what big government liberals have always preached.

One thing is clear: if Obama wins his “public option” in any form, it will become the anvil that broke the camel’s back.

If Obama’s “Big Bang” doesn’t go bust, America will be the one that goes bust and ends up exploding in a big bang of debt.