Connect the Dots

The Cloward-Piven Strategy:

First proposed in 1966 and named after Columbia University sociologists Richard Andrew Cloward and his wife Frances Fox Piven (today Piven is an honorary chair for the Democratic Socialists of America), 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.
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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 Obama Administration:

President Barack Obama has sent Congress a multi-trillion-dollar spending plan seeking to attack double-digit unemployment and boosting this year's federal deficit to a record-breaking $1.56 trillion.

Obama's new budget blueprint preaches the need to make tough choices to restrain run-away deficits. But it also aims to attack 10 percent joblessness, a priority the administration sees as badly needed to lift the country out of a deep recession that has cost 7.2 million jobs over the past two years.

The result is a budget plan that would give the country trillion-dollar-plus deficits for three consecutive years. Obama's new budget projects a spending increase of 5.7 percent for the current budget year and forecasts that spending would rise another 3 percent in 2011 to $3.83 trillion.