I.O. emphatically recommends this insider account of just how the Alinsky and Cloward-Piven curses upon society have yielded bitter fruit for America -- in the welfare crisis, the current finance crisis, and in the coming federal spending catastrophe. It may seem a long story for a blog, but it is of imperative value, for understanding how our proud nation is about to be brought to its knees.by Sam Sewell,
The Steady Drip blog
Note: It will quickly be obvious to the reader why details have been obscured, omitted or fictionalized in this narrative of events that began nearly forty years ago.
Se non è vero, è ben trovato.
Even small children know how to get what they want by creating a crisis. Witness any “temper tantrum.” My wife and I teach parenting skills. One of our sayings which we recommend to parents when dealing with a child’s “crisis strategy” is: “Poor planning on your part does not constitute a crisis on my part. No, you can’t borrow $20 because you are broke, even if you did promise to take Betty Lou to the movies tonight.” The child did not get their way. A similar “No!” needs to be said to adult politicians who have created a crisis to get their way.
Another example; Paris taxi-drivers, in protest against a police demand that they take physical examinations, threatened to obey every traffic law to the letter—which would, they vowed, produce the greatest traffic jam Paris had ever seen. The Taxi drivers got their way.
Creating a crisis to get one’s way is a strategy as old as Moses calling down plagues upon Pharaoh and saying “Let my people go.”
To better understand the fascinating story below we need some background information. In the late 1960s a pair of college professors who thought they were original thinkers came up with something called the
Cloward-Piven Strategy (CPS), a strategy for forcing political change through orchestrated crisis. “Cloward-Piven's early promoters cited Chicago radical community organizer Saul Alinsky as their inspiration.”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 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.” Notice that Alinski might have heard about the Paris taxi drivers, and then gave their strategy a radical left twist.
Saul had a huge influence on radical left people of the day. Saul was the subject of
Hillary Clinton's senior honors thesis at Wellesley College. “In early 1993, the White House requested that Wellesley not release the thesis to anyone. Wellesley complied, instituting a new rule that closed access to the thesis of any sitting U.S. president or first lady, a rule that in practice applied only to Rodham.” Alinski also strongly influenced a young Chicago “community organizer” named Barack Obama.
An old friend from my spooky past recently reminded me of his adventures back in the early 1970s. If you did not know that clergy are used for Intelligence and undercover missions you haven’t been paying attention to history. Believe it or not these decades old events, told by The Rev. Big Goon, help explain our present political and economic crisis.
Dear Aristotle the Hun
I’ve been doing some thinking that I thought I would share with you. My memories of the work I was doing when we knew each other at UMKC have really helped inform me about our present situation with our new President and the financial crisis.
I have visited “The Steady Drip” many times and I know your reputation for accurate research so you will find citations included to back up what I have to say. I noticed that on your blog you have expressed suspicions about the onset of the financial meltdown just in time to help Obama get elected. You also expressed suspicions about the most liberal President and Congress in the history of the nation conveniently coming into office at a time when the economy was so wounded that it might be possible to establish a socialist economic system. Just how “lucky” can these liberals get?
What I have to say may help you understand the dynamics but I doubt it will do away with your suspicions. Being suspicious is a job requirement for both Clergy and Intelligence work. I also know you are well connected to the Internet community and influential bloggers so you have my permission to use my comments as you see fit.
Here is my story: I arrived in Kansas City, Mo. in May of 1970, shortly after the first bombing done by a group of left wing radicals. I worked for the Western Diocese of the Episcopal Church which sponsored the St. Thomas Student Center at UMKC. Naming an Episcopal student center after “Doubting Thomas” was glaringly appropriate for a college campus in the early 70s No, your readers can not ask about my real employer. (As the old joke goes; “If I told you I would have to kill you.”)
The summer of 1970 in Kansas City was a really wild ride. In 1970 alone, an estimated 3,000 bombings and 50,000 bomb threats occurred in the United States, and Kansas City was not left out of the chaos. One of my assignments was to look into the activities of a group of radicals who, after they were arrested, became melodramatically known as “the Kansas City Four.” They were really bungling, small time radicals. A legal case from those days survives on the Internet.
It was arranged for the FBI to contact known radicals in the community and ask them questions about me. My “case officer” posed as a state employee, so my monthly meetings with him were open and aroused no suspicion. I was warmly accepted by the radical community, and even spent some time living at a place operated by young radicals called the Ecstatic Umbrella, until I found more permanent housing.
The Second Presbyterian Church at 52nd and Oak owned an apartment building, and one of the Kansas City bombers lived in that building. As well as doing my job as a campus chaplain, I became a youth pastor at Second Presbyterian, and took an apartment in their building. I must admit that I was very uncomfortable living in the same building with a LSD using, grass smoking, alcoholic who I knew was making bombs in his bedroom.
By the time I entered UMKC in the fall as a graduate student, my cover was already firmly established. To put a cinch knot on my cover story, I also became the Chaplain of the Viet Nam Veterans Against the War. I still experience a gratifying chuckle over how perfectly, easily, and quickly I had infiltrated the radical community in KC. It wasn’t that hard. Almost everyone was doing acid and grass. Every weekend there was a wild carnival of hippy, stoner, radical, love-child young people in Volker Park. Contact was easy. I won my status in the counter-culture community with nothing more than a prank. I purchased a case of dish washing liquid, and in the dark of night I poured the entire case into the Plaza fountain. My accomplices were very impressed with my boldness and it made the front page of the Kansas City Star.
I had a different name then. I was called Rev. Big Goon. It should be noted here that I physically resemble a great silver back gorilla, although my knuckles don’t drag on the ground. A local Kansas City undercover officer who had no idea who I was gave me that name. I saw it in a police report on activity in Volker Park. Years later I found out that my cover was so believable that I was on a list of dangerous radicals that Kansas City Chief of Police Clarence Kelly took with him when he was appointed as the Director of the FBI in 1973.
For me, the investigation of the Kansas City Four quickly fizzled. Other investigators uncovered the activities of the suspects, provided the evidence and they were arraigned in July of 1971. My last contact with that case was to arrange to be appointed as a Chaplain for the Jackson County jail, where I interviewed one of the suspects who was being held there as a federal prisoner awaiting trial.
The case was hugely overblown, in the way law enforcement and prosecutors will exaggerate to make their work seem to be more important and to advance their careers. One of them was more of a nut case than a criminal and he might have been the most dangerous because of his hatred and violence against “the system”. He is still alive, on the streets, and probably still dangerous.
I struck up a romantic involvement with a social worker from Chicago who was working for Family and Children’s Services, a state of Missouri agency. Her friends and contacts were a gold mine for my new mission. That is how I became involved with the Welfare Rights Organization (WRO) of Kansas City where I saw, first hand, how community activists applied the CPS theory in real life.
CPS and Saul Alinski were all the rage among left wing professors, activists, students and social workers. My social worker girl friend from Chicago knew all about Saul Alinski. CPS was a new idea seen as dazzlingly brilliant by social workers and other liberals. She introduced me to a radical community activist, also from Chicago, who was organizing poor black people who lived in Wayne Minor public housing. His name was Mark. Mark was also a clergyman. Mark introduced me to a powerfully charismatic black woman who was Executive Director of the Kansas City Welfare Rights Organization. There were several young white men and women who worked for the WRO. Mark taught me the ropes about how we were going to train these young “community organizers” and welfare recipients, so that they became effective foot soldiers for the left wing.
The socialist professors who devised the CPS: “The authors (Columbia University sociologists Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven) noted that the number of Americans subsisting on welfare -- about 8 million, at the time -- probably represented less than half the number who were technically eligible for full benefits. They proposed a "massive drive to recruit the poor onto the welfare rolls." Cloward and Piven calculated that persuading even a fraction of potential welfare recipients to demand their entitlements would bankrupt the system. The result, they predicted, would be "a profound financial and political crisis" that would unleash "powerful forces … for major economic reform at the national level." Their article 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, leftwing 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 clutch at this idea like drowning men to a lifeline. They would apply pressure on Washington to implement it. With every major city erupting into chaos, Washington would have to act.”
Mark and I were part of that "cadres of aggressive organizers." We would go through the vast, dilapidated cavern of poverty called Wayne Minor with a list of all the entitlements offered by the State of Missouri. Each person we talked to became instantly “motivated” to apply for more welfare benefits. Before long, people began seeking us out at the WRO office. Outreach to the community wasn’t necessary. The community flocked to us. We would show them how to fill out application forms, and many times we filled out the forms for them.
When we had a large number of people ready to apply for new benefits, or additional benefits they had not known they were entitled to before our training, we arranged for busses to take our new recruits to the state office building. We had spent many hours training them as to what to do and what not to do. We told them it was ok to be loud, obnoxious, aggressive, but to never be physical or damage property. In other words, do everything you can do to be uncivil, but don’t get yourself arrested. We planned the event for a Friday and, of course, we called the media. Our “trainees” staged a class “A” media event for the television cameras. Our first “action” was a rousing success.
When we got to the WRO office Monday morning there were hundreds of people waiting to be “trained” in how to collect welfare. The part of the welfare system to feel the most heat right away was what the state called “intake.” Intake social workers were overwhelmed, intimidated, and routinely approved questionable benefits because of the stress they were experiencing. The state began a panicky search for new intake workers, and anybody with a BA degree was practically dragged off the street. Larger office space was arranged for the intake department. Mark and I were heroes to the radical community.
Since this was happening at the same time in St. Louis and other cities, Kitt Bond, then Auditor of State of Missouri, and soon-to-become Governor, asked for help. I was assigned to brief his representative about what was behind the welfare revolt.
As it turns out Mark, the community organizer from Chicago, and my social worker girl friend from Chicago were also friends with the Kansas City Four. Soon my primary mission was accomplished, and I went on to other projects, but I never forgot the effectiveness of creating a crisis to bring about radical change. I concluded that the WRO and the Alinski/CPS inspired radical community organizers were more of a danger to the nation than the Laurel and Hardy bombers.
I stopped doing Intelligence work, the years went by, and I began my career as a full time Pastor. Not long after I “went straight” I again ran into the CPS and Saul Alinsky. During the administration of George H. W. Bush I began hearing reports of loud, obnoxious, aggressive, poor people taking over bank lobbies and demanding that they be given mortgages. All this was happening because community activists, many from Chicago, were doing the same thing to banks that had been done to the state welfare offices back in Kansas City. The role of WRO was now filled by ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now).
Stan Kurtz of National Review comments on ACORN’S tactics. “While ACORN holds to NWRO’s radical economic framework and its confrontational 1960’s-style tactics, the targets and strategy have changed. ACORN prefers to fly under the national radar, organizing locally in liberal urban areas — where, Stern observes, (Sol Stern ACORN’s Nutty Regime for Cities.” local legislators and reporters are often “slow to grasp how radical ACORN’s positions really are.” ACORN’s new goals are municipal “living wage” laws targeting “big-box” stores like Wal-Mart, rolling back welfare reform, and regulating banks — efforts styled as combating “predatory lending.” Unfortunately, instead of helping workers, ACORN’s living-wage campaigns drive businesses out of the very neighborhoods where jobs are needed most. ACORN’s opposition to welfare reform only threatens to worsen the self-reinforcing cycle of urban poverty and family breakdown. Perhaps most mischievously, says Stern, ACORN uses banking regulations to pressure financial institutions into massive “donations” that it uses to finance supposedly non-partisan voter turn-out drives.”
Obama’s role as a radical community organizer and ACORN “leadership trainer” is well established. Kurtz continues: “ACORN’s tactics are famously “in your face.” Just think of Code Pink’s well-known operations (i.e. threatening to occupy congressional offices, interrupting the testimony of General David Petraeus) and you’ll get the idea. ACORN protesters have disrupted Federal Reserve hearings, but mostly deploy their aggressive tactics locally. Chicago is home to one of its strongest chapters, and ACORN has burst into a closed city council meeting there. ACORN protestors in Baltimore disrupted a bankers’ dinner and sent four busloads of profanity-screaming protestors against the mayor’s home, terrifying his wife and kids. Even a Baltimore city council member who generally supports ACORN said their intimidation tactics had crossed the line.”
It wouldn’t take a degree in economics to see what was going to happen. This time the Alinski/CPS pressure wasn’t aimed at the state of Missouri and Kitt Bond. By 1999 Fannie Mae came under pressure from the Clinton administration to expand mortgage loans to low and moderate income borrowers. At the same time, institutions in the primary mortgage market pressed Fannie Mae to ease credit requirements on the mortgages it was willing to purchase, enabling them to make loans to subprime borrowers at interest rates higher than conventional loans. Everybody knows how the problem escalated from there
Do you still have doubts about your suspicions that the financial crisis happened just in time to help Obama get elected? Do you still have doubts about your suspicions that there is something fishy about the financial crisis and the way Congress passed the trillion dollar “Reward Liberal Causes and Constituents Bill” without anyone actually reading it, because we had a “crisis”? See I told you that I wouldn’t be able to help your suspicious nature. J
The Rev. Big Goon
To emphasize Rev. Big Goon’s comments here is an absolutely brilliant piece by Jim Simpson that details the connection of Barack Obama to those who practice the Cloward-Piven strategy.
“Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis”After reading Jim Simpson’s article you will more fully understand how CPS is connected to Barack Obama, and why Obama keeps using the word “crisis” in every speech he gives. I don’t know how to escape the conclusion that manufactured crisis is what clobbered the economy. Manufactured crisis is what made Obama President, and manufactured crisis is what drives his administration and his policies. There is a web site entitled, “Things I know are true but can’t prove”. Maybe I should send them an email.
Here is a part of the puzzle I think others have missed.If an enemy of America were to pair the Cloward-Piven strategy to the principles of the new science of networks, it would be possible to target a hub in a system, create a crisis, and by causing that hub to fail, create a domino effect in other hubs and the rest of the system. See here:
A news release from UMass Amherstand
Doug Simpson's weblog of research on the collision of law, networks and disruptive technologiesAnd a link to the most popular book on the subject
Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age by Duncan Watts“Columbia Professor
Duncan J. Watts builds on the work of mathematicians, physicists, biologists, sociologists, economists and others to advance the new science of networks. "
Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age " brings a sociologist’s perspective to a field relevant to those dealing with complex systems and their robustness and fragility under stress. The science of networks has significance for those wrestling with current issues of law and public policy in a wide spectrum of applications including electric power grids, insurance markets and anti-terror measures.In 1999, Barabasi and Albert published a ground breaking paper "Emergence of Scaling in Random Networks." Science, 286, 509-512. (1999). This paper showed that certain connections in real world networks don't have a normal ("bell curve") distribution but rather follow a power law distribution. This means that there is an increased likelihood of extreme events in such "scale free" networks. As a result, in scale-free networks, as networks evolve, a few nodes will be "hubs" with an extraordinary number of connections. Barabasi and Albert also found that the evolution of these hubs depended on the combination of network growth and "preferential attachment" - the tendency for new nodes to connect to those already well connected (the "rich get richer" effect.)”
The major reason other political commentators have not addressed the issue of network science is that only mathematicians and scientists understand it. My feeble attempt at a “plain speak” translation is that all networks tend to form hubs that are connected to thousands of other networks, and more importantly, to other hubs. These hubs are vulnerable to a “created crisis” and when that happens the entire web collapses, be it the World Wide Web or the web of the U.S. economy.
National security experts are well aware of the vulnerability of network hubs and publish
Network Vulnerability and Risk Assessment reports. This one is researched and published by DTIC Provider of DoD Technical Information to Support The Defense Community. One of the points to note is that: “Threats that originate inside the network tend to have the ability to exploit vulnerabilities in a serial form. This allows the attacker to traverse or "leap-frog" across the network to an advantageous position”. The most likely scenario would expect the attack to come from inside the network when we are looking at the financial network. I have read this risk assessment and it is too general to connect dots as to how a financial “crisis” might be timed and executed, but it is very clear that it can happen.
We know how leftist activists created a crisis and turned the mortgage lending business into a “mortgage welfare entitlement” lending policy. We know that the hub we know as “mortgage banking” failed, bringing down the rest of the economy with it. What we don’t know is how the failure was timed.
My guess is that the science of networks was used to tilt the election in Obama’s favor and damage the economy to such an extent that reshaping it along a socialist paradigm became possible.
One of my hopes in writing this article is to encourage real network scientists to take a look at my hypothesis. One friend who is a scientist at Amherst says I am on the right track, but that isn’t enough to make a definitive statement.
Remember all that talk about how savvy the Obama campaign was about using the Internet? Remember all those Internet CEO’s who were on the Obama team? Remember that George Soros,
"the man who broke the Bank of England", the king of creating market and currency crisis, was on Obama’s team? Can you really imagine a likely scenario where these people do not know about network science and how to use a created crisis to get what they want?
We know for sure that a crisis was deliberately created with malice aforethought by enemies of our country and liberal politicians. They overtly said they would do it and they did. Many of these created events have damaged our nation since 1970. The culprits aren’t even trying to hide the fact that they did it. Decent Americans have trouble believing that people could deliberately do something so evil. That is how deliberately evil people pull the wool over the eyes of decent people.
This isn’t a conspiracy theory. No black helicopters or deep throats. It isn’t hidden and it isn’t secret. It is easily visible for those who have eyes to see. Those radical socialists who used deliberately created crisis tactics were successful beyond their expectations. I am reminded of Osama Ben Laden’s pleasant surprise when he was informed about how successful the 9/11 attack had been. I imagine Obama shares Osama’s elation over his unlikely success.
Aristotle the Hun, the Reverend Big Goon, and Good Shepherd Sam
I.O. Epilogue ~
Look, all you who kindle a fire,
Who encircle yourselves with sparks:
Walk in the light of your fire and in the sparks you have kindled—
This you shall have from My hand:
You shall lie down in torment.
- Isaiah 50:11, NKJV
The views and statements expressed by Investigating Obama contributors, and in quotations and citations, are their own and do not necessarily reflect the position of Investigating Obama and Arlen Williams.
photo of ACORN demonstrator "capitalizing" upon ACORN's sabatoge, from Wikipedia
hat tip for Scripture: Bobby Conner
by Trevor Loudon, at New Zeal & KeyWiki BlogDr. Cloward's paper for the Socialist Scholars opened with a call for a systematic strategy of "irregular and disruptive tactics" among the poor, urging them to overburden city and state governments with their "demand,," as a means of forcing these governments to turn to the federal government for more and more funds.
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