guest COMMENTARY

President Cloward, Vice President Piven

Cloward-Piven is a political strategy of calculated chaos first described in 1966, by two Columbia University sociologists, Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. Their theory was published appropriately in the far left The Nation, the oldest continuously published news magazine in the country. Cloward-Piven’s goal was the creation of chaos so that: “A political crisis would result that could lead to legislation for a guaranteed annual income and thus an end to poverty.” The activities of the past year, from an imported Chinese coronavirus to a rigged and stolen presidential election are textbook Cloward-Piven, leading to a massive shift in the leadership and direction of America. We have gone from government by, of, and for the people to a tyrannical autocracy controlled by a small cabal of self-appointed elites.

Welcome to President Cloward and Vice President Piven, or vice versa for those who believe the current vice-president is really in charge, rather than the cognitively impaired president in name only.

Cloward-Piven’s objective is chaos and turmoil, or in their words, “A massive drive to recruit the poor onto the welfare rolls.” This is followed by: “A federal program of income redistribution has become necessary to elevate the poor en masse from poverty.”

Is there any better recap of COVID, including lockdowns, closed businesses, schools, and churches requiring the ruling class spending trillions of dollars they don’t have, to rectify the damage and destruction unleashed by the same ruling class that now wants to correct it?

The so-called stimulus is massive income redistribution, from the producers to the nonproducers who are in their situation either by choice or through the diktats of the ruling class and their decisions which turned producers into nonproducers. The stimulus will result in much of the middle class, and states in general, to further dependency on the federal government sustenance.

In Cloward-Piven terms, a crisis is: “A publicly visible disruption in some institutional sphere.” How do they create such a crisis? “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.”

Think of the George Floyd protests and riots, a convenient excuse for institutional disruption. Institutions of law and order suffered disruption, from calls to defund the police to blatant disregard for private property and businesses.

A preplanned riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6 created a false panic and a rushed certification of the Electoral College votes without scrutiny or continued from page

review, Congress rubberstamping a fraudulent election. It had the bonus of allowing a bogus impeachment of President Trump, kicking a man already down as a giant middle finger to Trump and his millions of supporters.

Cloward-Piven did not begin with the Trump presidency but during FDR’s New Deal, then further codified in the 1960s when it was given a name. This included Medicare, Medicaid and the Great Society welfare programs. New government agencies and bureaucracies choked innovation and economic growth. Ill-conceived and endless wars, expansion of food stamps, Medicaid, and other social welfare programs, resulted in the majority of Americans receiving government benefits.

A crisis led to each of these programs. Seniors and the poor unable to afford their medical care gave us Medicare and Medicaid. The government, replacing stay-at-home fathers, created the welfare state. A shortage of reliable Democrat voters was rectified by opening our borders to anyone, providing them with free benefits in exchange for not biting, or voting against, the hand that feeds them.

Democrats offer programs, unpopular and unappealing to the majority of Americans. Cloward-Piven is how they muscle their agenda through. It is their only strategy, accomplishing through chaos, fear and coercion what is unreachable via the ballot box. Bringing down the current system provides an opportunity to remake American society into their idealized version of Utopia, which in reality is the Soviet Union, Cuba, or China, with a small ruling class in charge and everyone else subservient. In other words, a reall ife Hunger Games dystopian society.

Donald Trump was simply a speed bump on the Cloward-Piven expressway. He was supposed to blow up the road to serfdom but instead only slowed it down for a few years. The deep state won easily.

I wonder if Trump even stood a chance. Did he simply provide an opportunity for the deep state to test their new strategies of weaponizing the government against political opponents and rigging elections to the point that they are irrelevant?

Now we have rule, not by our elected representatives, but by a senile old man, signing elective orders put in front of him, orders created by his puppet-masters hiding behind the curtains. COVID restrictions and lockdowns created such economic carnage that an entirely new dependency class was born. Add to that tens of millions of illegal immigrants, bringing dependency as well as potential health care concerns and costs and animosity toward the country paying all their bills, displacing American workers already struggling to regain their footing after COVID. Any resistance is met with protests and riots. Those who speak out may be cancelled or worse. The media simply parrots the talking points of the ruling class, acting like court eunuchs for the ruling establishment. Massive income redistribution via government programs with attacks on the First and Second Amendments make it impossible for the people to push back, either verbally or physically, against a tyrannical government, all to supposedly end poverty by making everyone poor and calling it the middle class.

Universal income doesn’t eliminate poverty, it simply expands it, but under a different name, something trendy, like equity. Putting dog poop on a scoop of ice cream and calling it an ice cream sundae doesn’t make it so, except in the eyes of the government that defines the acceptable terms.

You can be sure that guaranteed annual income will simply create a subservient lower class, eager to vote for their paymasters each November as long as they keep dripping narcotic dollars into their wallets, not enough to climb the economic ladder but enough to keep them satisfied.

The productive ones, pulling on the economic oars, will eventually tire from their efforts and take their guaranteed stipend and let someone else row the boat. Those in charge will live lavishly as they did in the capitol city of the Hunger Games.

Chaos and confusion, fear and uncertainty, in a never-ending stream courtesy of the government, solved with executive orders by the same government designed to “fix” the very problems they created.

All of this is being ushered in under the whip of President Cloward and Vice President Piven. And it seems the entire ruling class, regardless of political party, has signed on.

Brian C. Joondeph, M.D., is a physician and writer. He is on sabbatical from social media.