Preparing for Panic: ACORN, AIG, Cloward-Piven, and assorted coincidences (Updated)
March 22, 2009 by Procrustes
Basic RGBRBO has written a number of times the past months about the interconnectedness of ACORN, SEIU and the other unions, and various entities based on the Cloward-Piven Strategy (more below), to which we can now add AIG.
John Batchelor’s excellent post AIG Kulaks has prompted a wealth of response regarding various aspects of the AIG “situation”, including several items posted in today’s RBO News & Views — The Kulaks Revolt Edition.
But there are a lot more astute observations and insights to be shared. So, read the following, mark them for future reference, and — most and best of all — pass them on.
Investigating “control” and “redistribution” of the wealth
1-1-1-pujo1Turning first to John Batchelor’s article that was originally posted on his blog, Mark Maps remarked in the comments:
And so it begins…the war on capital and excellence and achievement. Those who have “too much” must be brought down because they damage the self-esteem of the underachievers and excite the greed of our political clown-class, the hollow men. Where and when will it end…at the bottom, in a vast grey wasteland, from sea to shining sea…with a wimper, not a bang.
Lou Filliger added:
“So it begins” with the Pujo hearings, 1912. So it continues with the AIG hearings, 2009. The socialists are preparing for the celebration of 100 years of virtually uninterrupted rule in this country. The lie that my parents told me when I was a child that this was a free country, has been the hardest lie to unlearn.
The actual name for the “Pujo hearings” is The Money Trust Investigation, which, in their textbook American Government, James Q. Wilson and John J. DiIulio, Jr. identify as the “Concentration of control of money, and consequently of credit.”
In a corporate governance timeline posted May 22, 2002, at MarketWatch, Jon Friedman wrote:
1912 — Congress holds the Pujo hearings, looking into J. Pierpont Morgan and his bank’s stranglehold over American industry through board representation and financing deals.
According to the Wikipedia article on the history of the Federal Reserve:
The hearings continued for a full year and were led by the Subcommittee’s counsel, Democratic lawyer Samuel Untermyer, who later also assisted in preparing the Federal Reserve Act. The “Pujo hearings” convinced much of the populace that America’s money largely rested in the hands of a select few on Wall Street.
1-1-1-aig-testify1Justin Fox wrote March 6 at TIME about some of the dissimilarities in the handling by Congress of the Pujo and AIG cases:
The 20th century saw two great Congressional inquiries into financial misbehavior—the Pujo hearings of 1912-1913 and the Pecora hearings of 1933-1934. The essential characteristic that both shared, other than their names begin with “P,” was that the questioning was done not by blowhard members of Congress but by very smart New York lawyers hired by Congress: Samuel Untermyer in 1912-1913 (Arsene Pujo of Louisiana was the chairman of the subcommittee that held the hearings, but he let Untermyer do the talking) and Ferdinand Pecora in 1933-1934. So far all we’ve gotten from this crisis are some disappointing hearings where elected officials—most of them with little knowledge and no prosecutorial skills—ask the questions. But both the Pujo and Pecora hearings did come several years after the financial collapses they were meant to investigate (the Panic of 1907 in Pujo’s case, in case you were wondering), meaning that we’ve still got lots of time.
Background on the AIG “juggernaut”
1-1-1-aig1Pundita recommends the three-part series of reports in The Washington Post by staff writers Robert O’Harrow Jr. and Brady Dennis. She comments:
The articles, which could be Pulitzer Prize material, ran from December 29-31, 2008. To my knowledge the best publicly-available background on how AIG became a juggernaut. Beautifully written, also. A joy to read.
o The Beautiful Machine
o A Crack in The System.
o Downgrades and Downfall.
The Cloward-Piven Strategy
1-1-1-cloward-pivenAnother commenter at John Batchelor’s blog, bortog, wrote:
Two left-wing Columbia University professors named Cloward and Piven mapped out the techniques for destroying democracy by overburdening government with spending. Barack Obama was groomed from childhood in this school of thought.
Follow the lineage of American socialism from Cloward-Piven, through Saul Alinsky, to Frank Marshall Davis and his protege, Barack Obama.
Kurt Nimmo, in his March 10 Infowars well-linked and informative article, Obama, the Cloward-Piven Strategy, and the New World Order, linked to Brannon Howse’s March 9 Worldview Radio interview with former White House budget analyst and author James Simpson.
Howse introduces his MP3 podcast with Simpson, “Barack Obama is “Destroying Our Economy on Purpose,” thusly (emphasis added):
Description: A pair of radical Columbia University professors by the name of Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven wrote an article in the radical magazine known as The Nation. The article was published on May 2, 1966 and laid out what is now known as the “Cloward-Piven Strategy”. The plan calls for the destruction of capitalism in America by swelling the welfare rolls to the point of collapsing our economy and then implementing socialism by nationalizing many private institutions. Cloward and Piven studied Saul Alinsky just like Hillary Clinton and President Obama. Listen as Brannon and his guest James Simpson explain how Cloward and Piven inspired the creation of ACORN that Obama worked for as a community organizer. This interview must be e-mailed all over the country. Americans must awaken and understand the goal of these radicals and what is to come if they succeed. Time is of the essence. Obama is not over his head as some have claimed; he knows exactly what he is doing. Understand the Cloward-Piven Strategy, the rules of Saul Alinsky and their Cultural Marxist worldview and you will understand that what is occurring is not by mistake.
DiscoverTheNetworks reports:
Inspired by the August 1965 riots in the black district of Watts in Los Angeles (which erupted after police had used batons to subdue a black man suspected of drunk driving), Cloward and Piven published an article titled “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty” in the May 2, 1966 issue of The Nation. Following its publication, The Nation sold an unprecedented 30,000 reprints. Activists were abuzz over the so-called “crisis strategy” or “Cloward-Piven Strategy,” as it came to be called. Many were eager to put it into effect.
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 key to sparking this rebellion would be to expose the inadequacy of the welfare state. Cloward-Piven’s early promoters cited radical organizer Saul Alinsky as their inspiration. “Make the enemy live up to their (sic) own book of rules,” Alinsky wrote in his 1972 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. [...]
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.
This was an example of what are commonly called Trojan Horse movements — mass movements whose outward purpose seems to be providing material help to the downtrodden, but whose real objective is to draft poor people into service as revolutionary foot soldiers; to mobilize poor people en masse to overwhelm government agencies with a flood of demands beyond the capacity of those agencies to meet. The flood of demands was calculated to break the budget, jam the bureaucratic gears into gridlock, and bring the system crashing down. Fear, turmoil, violence and economic collapse would accompany such a breakdown — providing perfect conditions for fostering radical change. That was the theory.
Robert E. Weir writes in his “Class in America” (screenshot from page 616 in Google book):
1-1-1-piven-21-1-1-piven-1
Here you can listen to Frances Fox Piven interviewed February 6, 2008, by Harold Channer:
“Weight of the Poor”
Both DiscoverTheNetworks and Robert Weir, in his “Class in America”, mention that the title for the Cloward-Piven article includes the phrase “weight of the poor.” It should surprise no one that this comes directly from Leon Trotsky, who complained in Chapter 8 of his 1927 “Platform of the Joint Opposition” (emphasis added):
The League of Communist Youth in the country is more and more losing its proletarian and poor peasant support. Its cultural and economic work in the country has for its main object the development of individual farms. The relative weight of the poor is systematically falling everywhere – in the general composition of the rural branches, in the active membership, in the nucleus composed of party members. Along with the continual diminishing of the influx of young town workers, the League is filling up in the countryside with middle and well-off peasant youth.
As in the town, so also in the country the tendency of the petty-bourgeois elements to get hold of the leadership of the League is growing. The group of clerical workers and “miscellaneous” is playing a more and more considerable role, especially in the rural organizations.
But is this not what has happened and continues to happen with Leftie agitator groups such as Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Project Vote, and all the Socialist/Marxist/Communist organizations with which the Unprez and his supporters are affiliated? Membership in these groups is not comprised of “the poor” — they are professionals and college students. SDS alumni such as Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, Carl Davidson, Mike Klonsky, and an endless list of aging 1960s radicals who either participated in Weather violence, hence going Underground to escape arrest, or continued along the radical activist path, were then and are now anything but “the poor”. White middle-to-upper class radicals don’t qualify.
For more on Ayers-Dohrn, SDS and Weather, see RBO’s Ayers-Dorhn Resource List; for more on the various Socialist/Marxist/Communist groups, see RBO’s The Obama Socialist/Marxist/Communist Reader.
More Cloward-Simpson and AIG
The following Cloward-Simpson Strategy chart is included in Simpson’s Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis, posted September 28, 2008, at American Thinker.
acorn-network
You can also read Simpson’s articles on the Cloward-Piven Strategy posted at FrontPage.com’s ‘American Daughter’ blog:
* Part I: Manufactured Crisis.
* Part II: Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis.
* Part III: Conspiracy of the Lemmings.
Uppity Woman forwarded the link for Steve Gilbert’s March 21 post Cloward-Piven, ACORN And AIG Witch Hunt at Sweetness & Light, which links back to Gilbert’s previoius posts, The Many Tentacles Of ‘Cloward-Piven’ (which includes the DiscoverTheNetworks profile on Cloward-Piven) and How The Left Is Spinning The Bank Crisis, both also posted March 21.
In the latter-named article, Gilbert opened with:
With the Obama ascendency it is all too easy to be consumed with the rush of news of the latest outrage against our republic. Consequently, we seldom have time to step back and reflect on the larger issues of the day.
So we thought we would take the time to post articles that are not necessarily ripped from the headlines of the day, but which address the more fundamental movements and trends behind them.
Gilbert draws our attention to an unlikely coincidence:
Notice how the people who espouse the ‘Cloward-Piven Strategy’ run like a scarlet thread through the organizations that figure so largely in the housing and banking – and voting – scandals.
Note too how President Obama, a confessed Alinsky acolyte, worked for the Cloward-Piven inspired “Project Vote” project. In fact, it is one of his proudest achievements.
For a good background on Barack “Alinsky” Obama, read RBO’s September 1, 2008, The ever-calculating Barack Obama. Alinsky’s bamboozler, okie-doker, flim-flam man and RBO News & Views for October 8, 2008, All in the Alinsky Family.
Also see Gilbert’s other ACORN-related articles (with many more S&L articles linked at each):
* Obama, ACORN/Project Vote And SEIU, December 10, 2008.
* Obama and ACORN: It’s a power thing, September 16, 2008.
ACORN: It’s much more than voter fraud
Returning to Steve Gilbert’s post re ACORN and AIG, in which he links to DiscoverTheNetworks’ ACORN profile, Gilbert writes:
The DTN article goes into much of the recent voter fraud allegations and convictions involving ACORN. As previously noted, voter fraud is part and parcel of the Cloward-Piven strategy of overwhelming the system. But since they are relatively well-known, we have left those out.
More to the point, as we have chronicled endlessly here at S&L, ACORN was hugely instrumental in the long-term campaign to get banks and savings and loans to give mortgages (and other forms of credit) to people who would not otherwise qualify – and who, it now turns out, could seldom afford them.
Like the NWRO, ACORN has regularly used the Alinsky/Coward-Piven tactics of threatening bank employees with violence, if they did not provide mortgages to their ‘constituents.’
But just to show how completely and utterly shameless they are, as we have previously reported, ACORN itself is now behind the protests against the very people who lent the money for these bad mortgages or who tried to insure these toxic loans.
As we were the first to report March 20, executives of AIG are now being harassed by ACORN foot soldiers in their very homes, via ACORN’s front group the so-called Working Families of Connecticut.
