The Cloward-Piven Strategy (Updated)

Away go America, down the drain!

John Maynard Keynes, who should be burning in Hell for his shyster economic theories, is largely responsible for our current looming apocalypse. His theory basically is that only demand, made more real than just wishing for things by creating fiat money and credit, is important, since in his myopic, context dropping theory, people produce a supply when there is a demand. (That they’d want the money they are paid to be valuable enough to buy someone else’s products he neglects to envision.)

His theory was refuted by F.A. Hayek at the time. But politicians usually ignored the refutations, since they saw a way of expanding their power and budgets while using a bit of Cambridge University produced con artistry as cover. Politicians are the first ones to get to spend new fiat currency and credits, deciding which donors, cronies, businesses, organizations will get it, before it causes inflation and reduces the purchasing power of the currency in general. It allows a constant redistribution of wealth to whoever controls the printing press and those nearest to them.

Keynes is also famous for saying: “The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually slaves of some defunct economist.” Once again he is wrong. We are currently being pushed even faster toward disaster not just by his voodoo macroeconomics, but by the ideas not of dead economists, but of a deceased sociologist.

The sociologists in question are a husband and wife team, the late Richard Cloward and his wife Francis Fox Piven (still with us at 92), professors at the Columbia University School of Social Work. The Cloward-Piven Strategy, which the couple first published in the socialist magazine The Nation, sought to bring change out of chaos. The idea was that social workers and other government employees and leftist groups (Ms. Piven was on the board of Democratic Socialists of America) would cajole anyone they could to apply for every government assistance program, until the welfare state was so overloaded it broke down, which would lead, they thought, to the institution of a “free” minimum guaranteed income for every American.

Whether this would have worked or not, subsequent strategists on the left clearly decided to expand it by importing poor people from anywhere in the third world. With billions of poor people you could certainly overload government assistance programs. You could also use them to replace misbehaving American voters. (Cloward and Piven were also the people behind motor-voter registration.) If you were really anti-American and “anti-imperialist” you could hope the expanded government, funded by Keynesian currency debasement, would lead to the collapse of the dollar as a reserve currency and the end of American power internationally. (Allowing the neo-Maoists of the CCP to take control of vast regions of the world.)

But government assistance programs are not the only thing adding illegal immigrants to the Cloward-Piven strategy allows you to overload. The current legal battle to force President Trump to give every illegal alien due process in extended court hearings before they are deported is an attempt to overload the courts. Progressives have never been in favor of due process generally. They might favor it for criminals or juvenile delinquents, but for citizens at large they have opposed an individual’s right to sue government regulators who force them to get a vaccination before they can hold a job or serve in the military, who tell them what cakes they must make or weddings they must service, or in general what economic activities they can engage in. Even in immigration policy, President Obama deported 313,000 illegal aliens in 2012 without any judicial review, earning him complaints from the ACLU.

But Obama had the confidence that he could win elections by appealing to actual American voters. Biden and Kamala Harris had no such confidence. The mass importation of 20 million unvetted illegal aliens by the Biden administration was mainly intended to plump up and multiply the number of Democrat Congressional Districts and the number of Electoral College votes of Blue States, as well as to replace American voters with fraudulent “motor-voter” illegal alien voters in all jurisdictions.

But it has another “change out of chaos” effect. The court system cannot provide due process for 20 million illegal aliens Biden imported who must now be deported. Trump and his supporters are not responsible for this. As radio pundit Larry O’Connor observes: “…if liberals or socialists or Trump-hating Republicans or libertarians or all the propagandists in the media are outraged by this reality, their outrage should be focused at Biden and Kamala and Mayorkas for creating this nightmare not Trump for triaging it.” Consider the reductio: If an invading army marched (or flew) into the United States, would Democrats say before anyone fires on them they must each individually be tried in court, because invading non-citizens deserve due process? As Bill Ackman tweeted: “A nation in which one administration can allow millions of unvetted illegal migrants into the country, but requires that a court vet each deportation decision in an individually adjudicated case will soon lose the values our democratic system was intended to preserve.”

Trump should keep deporting illegal aliens, especially the sex-trafficking, wife-beating, gang member scum among them. If Congress needs to pass legislation codifying that due process is not available at all (or to the same extent) for illegal aliens, then Congress best get to it.

A version of this was published in AmericanThinker.