By Deacon Mike Manno
(The Wanderer) – One of the nice things about the
Christmas holidays is that this paper skips an edition at the same time my
radio station goes to all sacred music through January 1. That gives me a nice
respite from column writing and program producing to just relax and contemplate
what the Old Year has wrought and what the New Year might unveil.
As I watched the year-end reviews on television I was
reminded of a column I wrote back in September of 2020. I looked it up and had
an amazing, but not unexpected revelation. And the first thought that crossed
my mind was: I warned you!!!
Here is, with some new additions, what I wrote back then:
I started with the old maxim of “divide and conquer” which
had been used throughout history to achieve military and political victory over
one’s opponents. A variant of that was used in our political system but it was
toned down somewhat by an overwhelming sense of national unity.
Unfortunately, I wrote then, that over time we have lost the sense of an
overarching unity that transcends all, with each side playing to its own base
of niche groups, railing against the other side’s groups in order to gain
power.
With that in mind, let’s go back to 1966 when two members of
the Democratic Socialists of America, Columbia University sociologists Richard Cloward
and his wife, Frances Fox Piven, articulated a strategy which sought to quicken
the fall of capitalism by overloading the government with a flood of impossible
demands which would push society into crisis and economic collapse.
Much of their theory was based on the work of socialist
community organizer Saul Alinsky. Cloward and Piven started with welfare
reform. They argued that the welfare system manipulated and weakened the poor
who could only advance when “the rest of society is afraid of them.” Yet in
their view, the welfare program provided a safety net which calmed anxieties
and placated the poor.
Thus Cloward and Piven argued that activists should work to
sabotage the welfare system by forcing it to collapse which would spark a poor
people’s rebellion to which the government must respond. They suggested
endorsing goals, such as a guaranteed living wage and the redistribution of
wealth.
Their strategy was outlined at the 1966 Socialists Scholars
Conference. The following year the National Welfare Rights Organization was
founded which began to use the tactics Cloward and Piven had suggested, in
which the poor and minorities were urged to seek all the benefits allowable
under law. The idea was to overwhelm the system using such tactics as relaxing welfare
requirements, like the elimination of work or job requirements, which would
lead to economic collapse.
As I wrote in 2020: Organizers used sit-ins, mass
demonstrations, school boycotts, picket lines, and riotous behaviors, to gain
legislative and court victories. Despite good economic times, welfare rolls
jumped over 200 percent; in New York City alone for every two working persons,
there was now one on welfare. Although the guaranteed living wage was not
achieved, the tens of billions of dollars in welfare entitlements came close to
sinking the economy, just as Cloward and Piven had predicted, and was partly
responsible for the bankruptcy of New York City in 1975.
After the attempt to scuttle the economy by trying to
overload the welfare system, the pair moved to other areas, one of which was
the voting system. They disapproved of the electoral system for the same reason
they complained about the welfare system: It placated the marginalized, giving
them the idea that their vote gave them a stake in the government which
dissipated their anger.
To that end the team concentrated on transforming the
Democratic Party. In 1982 they presented their plan in the left-wing
publication, Social Policy, which entailed the same roadmap they used to try to
overwhelm the welfare system: flood the system with new voters to provoke a
political backlash.
As I wrote back then: “The backlash would force officials
into using unfamiliar and cumbersome registration procedures, purging
non-voters from the rolls, and other voter suppression devices that would
create an anti-backlash against the establishment over voting rights. The
result led to the transformed Democratic Party, now allied with the poor in
their new ‘class struggle.’ Groups like ACORN led on these issues demanding
such things as the 1993 Motor-Voter law which made it easier to register to
vote but harder to determine the validity of the new registrations.”
The journalist and writer John Fund wrote in his book Stealing Elections:
“Examiners were under orders not to ask anyone for identification or proof of
citizenship. States had to permit mail-in voter registrations, which allowed
anyone to register without any personal contact with a registrar or election
officials. Finally, states were limited in pruning ‘deadwood’ — people who had
died, moved, or been convicted of crimes – from their rolls.”
Fund reported that Motor-Voter did swamp the voter rolls with
millions of invalid registrations filed on behalf of sometimes dead or
nonexistent persons, setting the stage for unprecedented levels of voter fraud
and voter disenfranchisement claims.
As I wrote then, Fund reported that in 2010 then-Cong. Barney
Frank (D., Mass) and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) were preparing legislation
whereby any person whose name was on any federal list would be automatically
registered to vote without any identity verification at polling stations. The
intent was to overwhelm the voting rolls to collapse the system as was tried
with the welfare system. It was all an outgrowth of their plans to destabilize
the election system causing chaos to the benefit of the socialists.
Of course, this necessitated help from friends embedded in
the government bureaucracies to “assist” in the administration of the new
socialist economic programs which were now being provided by the taxpayers.
Libertarian economist Wayne Allyn Root wrote in 2010: “Obama
is following the plan of Cloward & Piven….They outlined a plan to socialize
America by overwhelming the system with government spending and entitlement
demands. Add up the clues below. Taken individually they’re alarming. Taken as
a whole, it is a brilliant, Machiavellian game plan to turn the United States
into a socialist/Marxist state with a permanent majority that desperately needs
government for survival…and can be counted on to always vote for bigger
government. Why not? They have no responsibility to pay for it.”
He also suggested that if you add healthcare (Obamacare) with
statehood for the District of Columbia as well as Puerto Rico, legalization of
the approximately 12 million illegal immigrants then in the country, and
raising taxes you’ll get the “perfect Marxist scheme.”
That is what I wrote back in 2020, before the disastrous
response to the COVID pandemic which forced school, business, and even some
church closings and well before the debacle of the “COVID requires rules
change” election. And yet what happened immediately after the election was the
unofficial opening of the Southern Border and the swamping of our Homeland
Security system by a flood of incoming immigrants who were allowed to
boarder-jump all the while our border protectors were reduced to administrative
duties, baby sitting, and scattering the new arrivals across the nation by the
dark of night.
And we still hear of plans to give amnesty (read that
citizenship and voting rights) to all those who entered the country illegally,
as well as statehood for DC, and we already have authorized 87,000 new IRS
agents to suck up any lose change the bumpkins in the cheap seats have left.
Things are progressing nicely for those wishing to overload and override the
systems of government. Biden and his cronies know exactly what they are doing:
following the Marxist playbook of Cloward and Piven. It’s working nicely for
those who wish to — not to coin a phrase — “fundamentally change America.”
And we wonder why our traditional civic values, beliefs, and
even religious institutions are under attack. It’s all part of the plan.
Fentanyl anyone?
(You can reach Mike at:
DeaconMike@q.com and listen to him every Weekend on Faith On Trial at
https://iowacatholicradio.com/faith-on-trial/)
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