Empowerment by Manufactured Crisis

Joseph Farah of WorldNetDaily has an excellent op-ed today on the Cloward-Piven Strategy of orchestrated crisis.

Excerpts:

Back in January 1973, National Lampoon sported a brilliant cover – probably the satirical magazine’s most famous.

A cute black and white dog was the visual element, staring ominously at a revolver pointing at his head. The headline read: “If you don’t buy this magazine, we’ll kill this dog.”

People bought the magazine in droves, not because they believed the editors of National Lampoon were really going to kill the dog, but because it was so funny.

It strikes me that Barack Obama and the Democrat-dominated Congress are governing along the same lines. The only difference? They’re not joking.

Instead of putting guns to the heads of dogs, they are manufacturing crises they claim will result in the imminent destruction of the world as we know it and demanding we buy their solution or else.

It’s an old trick really. If not invented a few years before that National Lampoon cover, it was actually codified by a Marxist Columbia University professor and his research assistant in an article in The Nation May 2, 1966. The professor of social work was Richard A. Cloward, and his research assistant was Frances Fox Piven. What they authored became known as “the Cloward-Piven Strategy of Orchestrated Crisis.”

Cloward and Piven specifically calculated their strategy as a way to end poverty by bringing the capitalist system to collapse through a series of escalating demands that could never be met.

One of their principal demands was the establishment of a “guaranteed annual income.” Just six years later, this demand became a part of the platform of the 1972 Democratic National Convention and the presidential nominee that year, George McGovern. […]

Today, Obama is still employing the Cloward-Piven strategy, but not as a community organizer. Today he is the Community Organizer in Chief.

He’s still creating crises as a means of empowerment.

Think about it: With Obama, everything is a crisis – carbon dioxide levels, the banking industry, the automobile industry, the health care system and especially the economy.

He’s going to fix them all, he promises.

How?

By turning make-believe crises into real crises.