This afternoon, the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS)–a left-wing think tank based in Washington, DC–held a conference call to coordinate strategy among Occupy organizers, activists and supporters in the aftermath of the eviction of demonstrators in several cities.

From the Institute for Policy Studies website

IPS Executive Director John Cavanagh posed the following questions:

1. “How do we support the actual Occupy movement at this time… especially when some of the encampments have been shut down?”
2. “How do we expand the space for the ideas…that have been opened up by the Occupy movement?”

Cavanagh discussed the daily conference calls that Occupy organizers have been holding to coordinate strategy across the country, and urged participants to join in a national day of protest in solidarity with the activists who had been removed from Zuccotti Park in New York.

One of the sites providing information about local protests is november17.org, which is apparently affiliated with Van Jones’s Rebuilding the American Dream organization.

Cavanagh compared the Occupy protests with the Hoovervilles of the Great Depression, and suggested that both were protests against difficult economic conditions that the government failed to address. He also claimed that the Occupy movement was taking on the small-government, free-market legacy of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. (more…)

Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) founder Wade Rathke wants to use the Internet to overthrow the capitalist system.

He said so in his new book, Citizen Wealth: Winning the Campaign to Save Working Families, in which he serves up some community organizing war stories, and offers his thoughts on the future of organizing. Rathke’s currently on a cross-country book tour.

ACORN founder Wade Rathke (to the right of the microphone) at an ACORN-SEIU rally.

Rathke, a pioneer of the so-called welfare rights movement that aims to get Americans on welfare, devotes an entire chapter of his book to what he calls “The ‘Maximum Eligible Participation’ Solution.” It is a strategy for orchestrated crisis that savvy leftist groups across America are likely to embrace. He writes:

“[I]t is hard to believe that we cannot assemble the troops to mount a campaign for maximum eligible participation that harvests the opportunities and dollars already available if we could achieve full utilization of existing programs.”

Rathke acknowledges his support for the Cloward-Piven Strategy, an approach to radical social and political change articulated by Marxist university professors Richard A. Cloward and Frances Fox Piven in a 1966 Nation article, “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty.” The two academics called for “a massive drive to recruit the poor onto the welfare rolls” in an effort to overwhelm the system. [Italics in original.]

The strategy helped to bankrupt New York City in 1975. Years later, the Big Apple’s mayor, Rudy Giuliani, denounced the academic activists by name. “This wasn’t an accident,” Giuliani argued in a 1997 speech. “It wasn’t an atmospheric thing, it wasn’t supernatural. This is the result of policies and programs designed to have the maximum number of people get on welfare.”

(more…)