| THE ANTIPODAL SUCCESS OF CLOWARD-PIVEN | |
| Written by Dr. Jack Wheeler |
Thursday, 06 January 2011
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If you Google "Cloward-Piven" plus "Obama" you'll get over 53,000 hits. The "Cloward-Piven Strategy" has been fingered by dozens of conservative academics and pundits as the roadmap Zero is using to drive America to ruin.
In 1966, Richard Cloward and his wife Francis Fox Piven, as hard-core Marxist professors of sociology at Columbia, wrote an article in the premier journal of the left, The Nation, that launched their strategy: The Weight of the Poor.
That strategy is defined as forcing political change through orchestrated crisis. Its goal is to precipitate the replacement of capitalism with Marxist socialism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.
Sure sounds like exactly what Zero is doing, right? And sure enough, as we enter 2011, we find the Cloward-Piven Strategy succeeding in spades - antipodally.
Webster's defines "antipode" as 1) of or relating to diametrically opposite points on the earth's surface (e.g., the antipode of the North Pole is the South Pole), and 2) exactly or diametrically opposite.
That is, Zero, Pelosi & Reid put C-P into effect masterfully, and the result is just what the theory predicted - collapse - except that the revolution this effected was a bourgeois middle-class taxpayer one that is replacing the Democrats' socialism with a renewal of economic liberty and capitalism.
Cloward & Piven's impoverished masses - "the workers" - rising up to smash The System turned out to be patriotic God Bless America Tea Partyers! You just don't get irony better than this. Call it antipodal irony.
The moonbat mavens of Marxism at The Nation are so enraged by this that they provoked Francis Piven (Cloward died in 2001, she's 78 now and has an academic sinecure at New York's City University) into writing a screed of frustration called Mobilizing the Jobless.
"Where are the angry crowds, the demonstrations, sit-ins and unruly mobs?" she asks in perplexed anger, who should be demanding more "massive" government programs and "big new initiatives" from Washington.
The old broad is tripping out on drugs, booze, or senile dementia -- for last year was filled with just such angry crowds and demonstrations called Tea Party Rallies, and with sit-ins and protests called Townhalls. Except they were peaceful, not violent (Marxists always want violence), and they demanded less government, not more. No wonder her brain is addled.
So addled that she dreams of the bloodily violent strikes of students and public workers in Euroweenia, like Greece, France, and Britain recently, happening here. She's 78 but she's still living in the 1960s. You want a Class War in the US, Francis? OK, you got it - how about the class war soon to erupt between public and private unions?
Piven thinks the unemployed are going to rise up against the "robber-baron CEOs." In reality, they are rising up against the robber-baron public unions.
As the Wall Street Journal (1/04) observes, 40% of ironworkers in New Jersey are out of work, while public union workers are absurdly overemployed. The president of the State Senate, Steve Sweeney, is a ironworker union organizer, and he is partnering with Gov. Chris Christie to cut public union worker pay and pensions.
Across the Hudson, the construction workers union is cooperating with Gov. Andrew Cuomo to do the same to New York's public union workers. In state after state, governors and legislators trying to avert bankruptcy by slashing public union pay and pensions are going to find allies in unemployed private union workers.
Doesn't that give you the warm fuzzies, Francis?
The tyrannized and disenfranchised are rising up against their exploitative masters, her dream is coming true before her eyes - but the result will be more individual freedom and less government control, not the Marxist other way around.
Further, the dream is coming true peacefully, first at Tea Party meetings, then at the ballot box on Nov. 2nd, and now in the 112th Congress and statehouses across the country. It may not stay peaceful, true, when state after blue-leftie state goes belly up and those mean nasty evil Republicans in Congress refuse to bail them out.
There will be public union violence that will send tingles of excitement up Francis' (and Chrissie Mathews') leg. But the public unions will get no sympathy from the public, and they will lose.
It certainly won't be rhetorically peaceful in Congress, with railing Dem demagoguery given an ear-splitting megaphone by the Enemedia. The Dem din will no doubt intimidate some establishment Pub Congressistas - but new firebreathers like Allen West will intimidate them even more into not straying off the tea party path. After all, these new guys and gals comprise almost 40% of Pubs in the 112th House.
Then again, the leader of all the House Pubs, Speaker Boehner, showed steel in his spine this week. Five Dem senators sent him (1/03) a sneering letter promising they would block in the Senate any attempt by the Pub-led House to repeal ObamaCare. He replied the next day:
Senators Reid, Durbin, Schumer, Murray and Stabenow:
Thank you for reminding us - and the American people - of the backroom deal that you struck behind closed doors with ‘Big Pharma,' resulting in bigger profits for the drug companies, and higher prescription drug costs for 33 million seniors enrolled in Medicare Part D, at a cost to the taxpayers of $42.6 billion.
The House is going to pass legislation to repeal that now. You're welcome.
Speaker-Designate John Boehner Well, OK, John!
The momentum is now so forcefully on our side that Zero is quite likely to accommodate it in his State of the Union speech on January 25. Don't be surprised if he advocates slashing the corporate tax rate and eliminating the depreciation schedule (allowing full expensing) for capital expenditures of businesses.
Won't that drive the Dems nuts? Triangulation City.
From now on, the starring roles in the play are the House Republicans and Zero. The Senate Republicans will play a key supporting role, but the Democrats are only the extras.
Act One is going to climax in early March. At the very same time (McConnell, DeMint, and Paul Ryan try to keep a straight face when they say it's a coincidence), the entire federal government runs out of money, and the "debt ceiling" has to be raised or the Treasury Dept. will start defaulting on its T-bill interest payments - at least that's the story.
Zero will want to make a deal that he believes will best help him get re-elected next year. Boehner & Co will want to make a deal that best obliterates Zero's vast expansion of government. How the political calculus develops between them is going to be a fascinating spectacle. All the while the Dems in both the House and Senate are going to be onlookers, not players.
Since Boehner & Co have the high cards - they have the power of the purse and are willing to walk away from the game (if the government shuts down or defaults, so be it) - the odds are good that they will get the better of the deal. But Zero will get something too, and thus part of the credit when the deal is inked.
That's how Act One will end, but there are many acts to follow. If the Pubs play it well, they could gain whole enchilada in Nov. '12 and be well on their way to achieving Barry's Dream. They could blow it, sure - but the odds are with them.
The odds are with them because America is with them. America really isn't Euroweenia, as much as the Zeroes and Pivens wish it were. The Cloward-Piven Strategy could work there, and in many ways it has. But not here.
It worked in expanding the federal welfare state to the breaking point - and that was the goal, to reach that breaking point. The last thing Pliven and her acolytes like Zero expected was their crisis to break against them, for America to recover her freedom and not fail.
Cloward-Piven has succeeded in achieving the exact opposite of its intent. How antipodal. How American. |
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