Frances Fox Piven, one of the co-authors of the Cloward-Piven strategy to overwhelm the state with millions of additional welfare claimants, has published an article in the Nation calling for the Occupy Wall Street movement to re-invigorate itself by recruiting the poor.

Photo source: aeu.org

In a telling admission that Occupy does not, in fact, represent the poor, Piven criticizes both liberals and unions for their repeated use of the term “middle class” in their political campaigns. Instead, she said, Occupy must appeal to issues that poor Americans care about:

To fully realize an ethic of inclusion, the poorest and most benighted Americans should become part of our protest movement. We need to increase their numbers at our demonstrations, and we need to undertake the protest actions that deal with their most urgent needs—including the attacks on the social safety net that hit them hardest.

While remnants of the ACORN organization did, apparently, pay poor people to attend Occupy Wall Street, Piven envisions a strategy that has a clearer ideological component. Instead of overwhelming the welfare system, as she once advocated, Piven now believes poor people should be mobilized to defend it–ironically, perhaps, since the long hoped-for possibility of financial insolvency is no longer distant.

Piven believes that an Occupy movement that succeeds in recruiting “a proud and angry” poor could bring about the kind of radical change that the American left had long sought (and which, perhaps, it had hoped to achieve in the Obama presidency):

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It hasn’t taken long for the socialist-organized “occupation” of Wall Street to jump the shark.

In a surreal news conference at the United Nations, anti-American radical and rogue financier George Soros (net worth: $22 billion) threw in his lot with the thousands of Communists, anarchists, eco-feminists, malingerers, and professional protesters who have been baiting and taunting police in lower Manhattan as part of a mass demonstration that began September 17.

The protests, which have spread to other large cities, are part of what ACORN’s neo-communist founder Wade Rathke calls an “anti-banking jihad.” Not surprisingly, the remnants of the ACORN network are deeply involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement. New York ACORN’s new front group, New York Communities for Change (NYCC), led by veteran ACORN enforcer Jon Kest, is one of the major protest groups leading the effort to turn America into one big socialist armpit.

Kest explained why NYCC is involved by using what has become the standard Marxist boilerplate about the financial collapse. “When the big banks tanked our economy they took away millions of people’s shot at achieving the American Dream,” he blogged. “It’s about time all these people come together and hold Wall Street accountable for what they’ve done to our futures and the future of this country.” Of course Kest didn’t bother to mention the role that ACORN played in creating the mortgage bubble by strong-arming Fannie Mae, pushing the financial affirmative action scheme known as the Community Reinvestment Act, and blackmailing banks that didn’t want to lend money to people who wouldn’t be able to pay it back.

SEIU board member Stephen Lerner has vowed to do his part to drive a stake through the heart of capitalism and drag the populace into economic misery. Lerner says he wants to “bring down the stock market” through a campaign of disruption. Last year George Goehl, executive director of Chicago-based National People’s Action, said that “the banking crisis” was “the next big thing,” and “the way to build a big economic justice movement in this country.”

Soros said he sympathizes with the rabble. “Actually I can understand [the protesters’] sentiment, frankly,” said the preeminent funder of the American activist Left in remarks to reporters.

But anyone who has followed Soros’s life wouldn’t dare to describe him as a working class hero.

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Does President Obama approve of the SEIU/ACORN-led economic terrorism campaign that is now directed at JPMorgan Chase?

It seems like a reasonable question to ask. SEIU is President Obama’s favorite union and ACORN is his favorite community organizing outfit.

The campaign, engineered by SEIU board member Stephen Lerner, is designed, in Lerner’s words, “to disrupt and create uncertainty for capital, for how corporations operate … there are actually extraordinary things that we could do right now that would start to destabilize the folks that are in power and start to rebuild a movement.”

According to White House visitor logs, “Stephen Lerner” paid four visits to the Obama White House. On two of those visits he apparently met with then-White House political director Patrick Gaspard, a former executive vice president at the militant SEIU Local 1199. Gaspard, a longtime ACORN operative and Alinskyite, is now executive director of the DNC where he oversees the odious Organizing for America project.

I wonder what they talked about. Hmmmm.

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“Radicals are most adept at breaking the necks of conservatives,” said the small-c communist tactician Saul Alinsky, who is now worshipped by the Obama administration and the activist Left. The thuggish, in-your-face activist group ACORN was the vehicle that 1960s radicals created to bash Americans’ heads in to get them to accept a radical transformation of American society. The antisocial group also led the way in destigmatizing welfare by pushing people to abandon their job searches and get on the public dole.

When Barack Obama was a little boy surrounded by parents and grandparents and mentors sympathetic to communism, likeminded people were building ACORN’s parent organization, the National Welfare Rights Organization. Armed with tax dollars, left-wing extremists Richard Cloward, Frances Fox Piven, and Alinsky were at play in the 1960s, wreaking havoc on society in an effort to induce revolutionary change. All three of these at the time relatively obscure figures labored to create NWRO along with a vast constellation of tax-supported groups determined to destroy the American society they loathed.

Changes in federal social policy in the early 1960s helped to lay the groundwork for this artificial activism and the welfare-related unrest it caused. President Lyndon Johnson’s “unconditional war on poverty in America” really should have been called an unconditional war on American values. For four decades, ACORN destroyed property, forcibly occupied banks, assaulted employees of the companies they targeted, intimidated executives and government officials at their family homes, and engineered home invasions in order to seize foreclosed properties. ACORN took money from powerful special interests to produce instant rent-a-mobs to harass their clients’ competitors.

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The far left has attempted to portray their elderly hero, Frances Fox Piven, as a lonely shut-in who spends her time knitting mittens and eating Werther’s Originals in her New York apartment.

But the truth is that age has not dampened Piven’s appetite for radical socialist political activities.

Piven, an academic who is still on the board of ACORN-partner Project Vote, has announced that she will be co-hosting a 1960s-style “teach-in” April 5th, and she’s bringing in some heavy hitters.

The national event, which will be simulcast, will also feature fellow socialist professor Cornel West and AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka.  SEIU is also participating.

At the recent Left Forum, where Piven greeted attendees as “comrades,” she explained “a few practical steps” protesters could take in order to fight back against capitalism.

They include demonstrations or sit-ins at banks, “fights over the public sector,” (whatever that means), and protests against home foreclosures. She explained that all of these tactics are part of the fight against the “corporate campaign to take down America.”

For the teach-ins, several “content themes” are suggested.

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Progressives – and socialists – will do anything to discredit the Tea Party movement.  Just ask Frances Fox Piven, who, along with her husband Richard Cloward, designed the theory of “collapsing the system” to force socialist principles – primarily redistribution of wealth – onto America.

In a recent interview published on CommonDreams.org, Piven said this of the Tea Party movement:

“It is a media concoction, an expression of white nationalism, a cry of resentment, and so on. But it also reflects a well-funded campaign by the Right that singles out groups like ACORN, the SEIU (Service Employees International Union), the teachers’ unions, and environmental projects, to disable not only the Left, which after all is not at this point strong enough to be much of a threat, but the Democratic Party.”

Remember Kenneth Gladney, the black Tea Party member who was holding “Don’t Tread on Me” flags and viciously beaten in St. Louis by SEIU thugs?  Yep, he was just expressing his inner white nationalism.

As Gladney laid on the ground, getting kicked and enduring racial slurs by union goons—well, that was just a media concoction.

Regardless of the facts, Piven sees a racist around every right corner.  Earlier this year, she said this of Glenn Beck:

“So, it’s an old technique of right-wing ideologues – finding a scapegoat … and attributing things that go wrong in American society to somebody who’s foreign or dark skinned or an intellectual.”

According to Piven, if you oppose the Left’s agenda, you’re obviously a racist.  Isn’t it about time we get past that, Fran?

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For quite some time, Noam Chomsky has joined other radical luminaries on the “Editorial Advisory Group” of the ACORN-linked Social Policy magazine.  Published by ACORN founder Wade Rathke, the magazine airs the views of Chomsky, Frances Fox Piven, Gloria Steinem, and Peter Dreier, among others.

This is the same publication that ran an analytical piece on Barack Obama’s 2004 primary campaign for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate, written by a Chicago ACORN leader.

The article contained such gems as: “By the time he ran for U.S. Senate, we were old friends.”  The point is not to bring up President Obama’s apparently forgotten memories, but instead to point out Chomsky is not some nut that is isolated – he runs with the big dogs.

Chomsky recently painted a disturbing picture of America in the Russian news outlet Pravda, when he compared the opposition to President Obama and the Congress’ policies to what happened in Germany just prior to Adolf Hitler’s rise to power.

“It’s very similar to Weimar Germany, the parallels are striking.

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While ACORN has earned much of the scorn of the press and public in recent months, its voter registration arm, Project Vote, is actually the entity that has been conducting the questionable voter registration drives.

Project Vote has been accused of voter registrations fraud in more than a dozen states.  Its parent group ACORN, along with a staff member, are scheduled to be tried for fraud in Nevada in a matter of days. Recently, ACORN was nailed under the RICO Act in Ohio and ordered to never come back to the state.  More importantly, the settlement also said ACORN couldn’t simply morph into another organization and cause the same type of trouble in Ohio.

In short, Project Vote is at the root of ACORN’s voter registration fraud problems.

So as ACORN is transforming, Project Vote is transforming, too.  According to a new article in The Nation, Frances Fox Piven of “Cloward-Piven Strategy” fame, recently joined the Project Vote board of directors.

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The original Cloward-Piven Strategy, born in a 1966 article in The Nation magazine, was to overwhelm the welfare system by flooding the rolls with new recipients.  The government would not be able to keep up (this was a time when a government could actually go bankrupt), the system would crash and a Democratic presidential administration would be “forced” to implement a “guaranteed annual income” for Americans.

Fast forward to the 21^st Century.  America’s in the midst of a home foreclosure crisis.

Piven’s new strategy?  Force the government and banks to deal with the problem by convincing approximately two million people to refuse to leave their homes.  ACORN has been implementing this strategy with its Home Defenders program.

Is it possible ACORN sting man James O’Keefe could have spoiled the implementation of this new strategy?  The O’Keefe-Giles videos surfaced at precisely the right time to disrupt the Home Defenders scheme.

The organization was rocked by the major scandal and knocked on its heels politically and financially.

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Frances Fox Piven, honorary chair of the Democratic Socialists of America, can arguably be considered the mother of ACORN.  At least, her ideas and theories set ACORN, and its parent, the National Welfare Rights Organization, onto a path of creating and manipulating crisis situations to further their agenda of a more equal “distribution of wealth” in America. In other words, socialism.

It’s a path, I believe, that runs contrary to our country’s original intent.  But Piven doesn’t think so.  In her book, “Challenging Authority,” she quoted both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams.

What I found most bizarre was the apparent disconnect in Piven’s mind between individual rights and property rights, particularly the idea of acquiring as much wealth as one wishes without fear of government encroachment. It’s impossible to believe that Jefferson, Adams and the other founders – most of them very successful entrepreneurs – could have envisioned or approved of a massive national government that siphons property and economic rights from private citizens.

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Throughout much of 2009, Glenn Beck extensively covered the “Cloward-Piven Strategy” that was first brought into the public domain in a May 1966 article in The Nation magazine.  In the article, Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, two Columbia professors, developed a strategy by which the welfare system could be overwhelmed with demand, broken, and replaced with a “guaranteed annual income.”

Beck has successfully made the argument that the Cloward-Piven Strategy was a blueprint for success at overwhelming that system.  Don’t think it worked?  Ask the leaders of New York City.  The strategy worked so well, the mass rush for welfare benefits bankrupted the city in the 1970s.

So as Beck has brought new light to this strategy, no one has asked Frances Fox Piven’s opinion.  Until now.

Piven dismisses Beck’s opinion as “silly.”  But she also went a step farther.

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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.”

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