Cloward-Piven

As the Obama administration's agenda continues to unfold, Americans are now forced to confront the issue of whether Barack Obama's presidency represents a departure from our traditions of free-market capitalism, individual freedom (and accountability) and social modesty. As we bear witness to the socialization of formerly private enterprises and the looming collectivization of education and health care, we might be forgiven for asking whether Obama is serving as a Trojan Horse for radical elements whose agenda could not otherwise be implemented save for the current economic crisis. Now more than ever, it is appropriate to at least examine the basis for such an opinion.

Presented as food for thought, I submit several items for your review. By way of recapitulation for some, the video below provides a good overview of the Cloward-Piven Strategy (named for the late Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven), which intended to force social change by way of mobilizing the poor, as discussed more extensively here. For additional background on Cloward-Piven, please review an op-ed by Robert Chandler from the Washington Times.



I also encourage a review a widely-circulated American Thinker article by James Simpson, which makes the case that the current economic downturn was in fact caused by Democrats in order to provide for the election of a Democratic president, as well as to allow for the successful implementation of their collectivist agenda.

Taken separately, each piece suggests that there is great potential for the implementation of Cloward-Piven. Reviewed in toto, a dark picture of America's future emerges. Consider that fact that even five months ago, it would have been impossible to conceive of an American president summarily firing the CEO of a private corporation. Doubtless, no one would ever have thought that executives from another private entity could be forced to give back bonuses that were promised as a condition of employment (and were codified in Federal law), or else have them subject to a 90 percent tax rate.

It is my sense that our Community Organizer-In Chief is well on his way to establishing Cloward-Piven as the law of the land. If this does not frighten you, consider the plight of the African American underclass, the primary tool for executing this strategy. As a whole, the black underclass lives in conditions that are in many ways worse than when the Civil Rights Movement began. Today, upwards of 75 percent of all black children are born out of wedlock, high school graduation rates in many inner-city schools are as low as 30 percent and violence is endemic throughout black communities across the country. There is absolutely no reason to believe that these conditions will not become more widespread with the wholesale adoption of Cloward-Piven.

Black Friday

The video (H/T: Fox News Chicago) tells the story in richer detail than the crime deserves; it was a pitifully unremarkable occurrence in the grand scheme of life in the inner city. Last Friday, three men held up the Get M Girlz Apparel clothing store on Chicago's South Side. In the process one of the thieves pointed a gun at an unarmed security guard, 22 year-old Harold Dean Long, while the others grabbed as much clothing as their guilty hands could carry.

The gunman shot Long (twice actually, once during a struggle upon entering the store and again upon the robbers' departure), who was pronounced dead at a local hospital. According to the Chicago Tribune, Long would have been 23 on December 5, with the Tribune noting that he planned to celebrate in grand fashion, "wearing Gucci and partying at a hip-hop club with friends and relatives."

As I said, this transgression was surely not uncommon, as store owners on the 2500 block of West 63rd Street were accustomed to getting robbed on a fairly regular basis. What made this story newsworthy was its brazen nature, occurring by the broad light of midday. What makes all of this noteworthy is the fact that it was entirely and otherwise unremarkable, this sort of thing again being relatively commonplace. The corrosive idea that the personal property of another human being is subject to confiscation - at the point of a gun no less - has sown its taproot deep into the mindset of the underclass.

The mind reels as one wonders whether it was always thus. Surely, criminal predation has been a human proclivity since Cain and Abel, and nothing suggests that America's black ghettos were at any point pristinely devoid of the turpitudinous. My sense is that the difference today is an absence of any sense of individual moral efficacy on the greater part of the black underclass. Their ability to act with ethical responsibility has atrophied in the presence of the moral entropy brought about by liberal "do-gooders" of the 1960's countercultural Left (such as Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, among others.)

As much has been documented writ large by authors such as John McWhorter, whose book Winning the Race details how the cultural meme of "therapeutic alienation" caused blacks to withdraw from the stereotypically white worlds of work and education. But this sense of disengagement from middle-class responsibilities has also been examined on the scale of the personal by Shelby Steele in White Guilt. In his book, Steele provides his recollections of comedian/activist Dick Gregory speaking at a black power rally at a church on Chicago's South Side in the summer of 1967.

Somewhere toward the middle of Gregory's long riff I was overcome by a feeling of utter relief. It was as if some old and grinding worry - one I had considered permanent, as inevitable as nature - had simply passed away. I felt exhilarated, wildly happy - this despite the fact that Gregory was clearly pulling for the era's all-purpose emotion: black anger.

But there was another meaning within his words. He was also saying that a racist society had inflicted responsibility on us while denying us the freedom to do much with it. In other words, he was describing the crucible in which responsibility was a tool of oppression. And his clear implication was that responsibility was therefore illegitimate where blacks were concerned. Responsibility made fools of us. Worse, it made us complicit in our own oppression. As we labored away with the odds fixed against us, we only reinforced the racist social order that oppressed us. (Emphasis in original.)

Steele goes on to point out that Dick Gregory's concept of the illegitimacy of black responsibility was hardly a minority opinion (seriously folks, no pun intended) by reminding us of President Lyndon Baines Johnson's famous speech at Howard University two years prior. In Steele's formulation, LBJ "clearly realized that full responsibility had been an unfair and oppressive burden on blacks," adding "His Great Society was... a redistribution plan for responsibility by which he asked white America to assume considerable responsibility for black advancement." (Emphasis in original.)

Little has changed over the decades, save for liberalism's prism refracting LBJ's sincere - if ill-considered - intentions into a reality of sneering, head-patting patronization of blacks. As much has rendered many in the black underclass unwilling to accept responsibility for themselves and their actions, let alone to accept responsibility for following the dictates of any particular ethic. Doubtless, belief in the former is foundational to adoption of the latter, in as much as moral responsibility relies as on a firm understanding of a moral code as well as the willingness to assume a personal responsibility to uphold such a code.

Without acceptance of personal responsibility, especially for one's own morality - of which African Americans have been denuded, having confused the fig leaf of unceasing indignation for moral authority - it is impossible to act in any way bespeaking moral efficacy. The ideal of an individual morality has been supplanted by a collectivized morality of progressive origins that more highly prizes redistribution of wealth and acceptance of politically correct conceptions of racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. Consequently, drug dealing, gang-banging and all manner of murderous thuggery are waved away as mere nuisances in the face of "structural impediments" erected as a consequence of "institutionalized racism." (A telling example of how far the moral culture of the underclass has fallen is the hero worship and cultist lionization of ex-drug dealers turned rappers such as 50 Cent, Jay-Z, Snoop Dogg, et al.)

As I have gotten older, my storehouse of certainties has dwindled down to a precious remnant. But one that I hold to with an unfailing grip is my belief that I am a black conservative solely and entirely because liberalism failed me and my people; it did not do much good, indeed it did us all great harm. I consider myself blessed in that I am aware of what has been done to a once proud and morally upstanding race. The day after Thanksgiving, which typically signifies when retailers will get "in the black" for the year, has taken on a new meaning for the staff of Get M Girlz. Sadly, as long as the benighted masses of African Americans stumble in the moral darkness of progressivism, every day in America's ghettos will be Black Friday.

In SiCKOness and in Health - Sometime over Father's Day weekend, Michael Moore's latest film was available for viewing in its entirety on YouTube. (Apparently, a copy of the film that Moore stashed away in Canada was leaked.) I was fully prepared to watch the movie on my iMac without benefit of overpriced snacks, artery-clogging hot dogs or running commentary from moviegoers behind me. Of course, by the time I went to look for SiCKO online the next day, a phalanx of lawyers induced YouTube to remove the movie, and last night I was forced to pony up $9.75 to see Moore's latest offering. The supreme irony is that I had to pay to see a film that advocates "free" single-payer health care. (How about some free "movie care" Mike?)

No one will confuse me with a film critic; by my lights, it is tough to compare Moore's work with most other films, or with other documentaries for that matter. With that said, SiCKO did not disappoint. As with every one of Michael Moore's movies, SiCKO is the same stew of wholly one-sided polemic combined with half-hearted attempts to amuse or tug at his viewer's emotions, all of which are completely undercut by his grating smugness. And as is always the case, the images and footage serve Moore in the same fashion as a magician's comely assistant, in that they distract rather than inform.

But my main problem with SiCKO has nothing to do with any of the foregoing, but lies entirely with his refusal to acknowledge that a single-payer system would have its flaws. (This is not unlike his refusal to acknowledge that antebellum Iraq was less than idyllic in Fahrenheit 9/11.) To be sure, any health care system - or more correctly, any health care resource distribution system - would have its requisite trade offs. Canadians, Europeans and Cubans "pay" for their health care not only by way of confiscatory tax rates, but also by way of sclerotic economies, non-existent job creation and intrusive government.

For his part, Moore will not admit that anything will need to change. He intimates that Americans will enjoy the same level of choice of providers and access to care as they do presently, with the only adjustment being the mechanism by which health care providers are paid. Of course "the pay's the thing", as it is the payment mechanism that drives how health care resources are allocated. We have arrived at our patchwork quilt of diverse payment schemes and conflicting incentives entirely by way of government encroachment. Indeed, as government has gotten more involved in providing and paying for health care, the cost of care for both private and public beneficiaries has only increased.

Moore and other pleaders for single-payer health care also seem ignorant (or resentful) of the idea that America's health care system is at least in part a product of our individualist cultural ethic. Because of this cultural idiosyncrasy, we have been able to lead the world in both economic growth and medical innovation. It goes without saying that the world reaps the benefit of medical and pharmaceutical treatments that have been underwritten and subsidized by the U.S.

But beyond the effects of culture on the provision of health care, we would do well to examine the effect of universal health care and the other components of the welfare state on the culture. What we know of such impacts is not encouraging, as discussed elsewhere.

As distinct from charity that is a product of one's own choice, the coercive and confiscatory traits of the welfare state have a soul-corroding effect on both the "donor" and the receiver. Because the central element of volition is removed from supposedly charitable behaviors under the welfare-state model, the habits of charity, empathy and compassion are not practiced. Both our ability and willingness to donate to others atrophy from lack of use, and the moral component of our humanity is diminished as a consequence.

This phenomenon is evidenced by the fact that in contrast to most of the socialist states of Europe, rates of charitable giving are extremely high the United States, particularly international aid. A new report from the Charities Aid Foundation concludes that the U.S. "is the most generous in donating an average of 1.7 percent [of GDP] each year," with Britain averaging 0.7 percent and Germany and France contributing 0.22 percent and 0.14 percent respectively. And according to the Hudson Institute’s 2006 Index of Global Philanthropy, in 2004, Americans gave a combined total of $71 billion in non-governmental charitable assistance to the developing world. This private aid was over and above the $19.7 billion provided by the U.S. government that same year.

Using Europe as an anecdotal example, it does appear that there is something specific to life in a welfare state that diminishes a person's generosity of spirit. Similarly, previous expansions of the American welfare state by way of the Cloward-Piven strategy facilitated a cultural cannibalism in which counterculturalists of the 1960s sought to destroy American culture in order to remake it in a form more to their liking, as discussed here.

The damage done during this period of American history, and the carelessness with which this program was engaged, cannot be overlooked or overstated. Here you had a pair of privileged white elites whose only concern was to create economic havoc for the federal government in order to encourage some form of guaranteed income for all Americans. And in order to achieve this end, they were willing to use millions of faceless and ultimately powerless blacks as implements. As one reads A Strategy to End Poverty, two things become apparent. First, one is struck by [Richard] Cloward and [Frances Fox] Piven's temerity in that they would presume to be able to single-handedly eradicate poverty in America. But secondly, it becomes clear that Cloward and Piven gave no thought to the long term effects of their scheme.

Theirs was not a plan designed to improve the educational, political of social standing of the poor. To Cloward and Piven, inner city blacks were just another one of the "elements in the big-city Democratic coalition." By putting their plan into effect, Richard Cloward, Frances Fox Piven, George Wiley and the entire [National Welfare Rights Organization] organization expanded the reach and impact of the welfare system into the lives of impoverished blacks. And by widening the scope of a program that "hunted after-hours for a man in the house," the Cloward-Piven experiment contributed terribly to the breakup of untold millions of poor and minority families by depriving them of the benefits of a consistent male presence.

In so doing, Cloward and Piven's experiment did seemingly irreparable damage to the body politic of America. It effectively brought about the end of the civil rights movement as a force for moral excellence, and brought about the advent of the "civil wrongs" movement. Whereas the civil rights struggle was about equality and empowerment, the civil wrongs movement has everything to do with avoidance of responsibility and a sense of entitlement, the results of which are evident in many benighted communities yet today.

To be sure, the liberal critique of America's health care system has little if anything to do with its cost, its inefficiency or its inability to provide relief or cure for cancer, AIDS or heart disease, as changing the payer would have no positive impact on any of these circumstances. The Left despises our system of health care entirely because it is insufficiently "universal" (read equal, at least by liberal standards.) But the unwillingness of the Left to consider the negative consequences of single-payer health care that have already manifested themselves in Canada and elsewhere - coupled with their inability to recognize the detrimental sequela of previous welfare state expansions in the U.S. - robs their argument of persuasive power and applicability to the real world. My sense is that this suits them just fine, as liberalism works best in two dimensional situations, be it on the printed page or the movie screen.

Let Us Make Man: Epilogue - The Congressional Record for December 6, 2005 informs us that the House Select Bipartisan Committee to Investigate the Preparation for and Response to Hurricane Katrina held a hearing entitled "Hurricane Katrina: Voices from Inside the Storm." On that Tuesday, testimony was heard from Charles Allen, Vice Mayor of Newport News, Virginia, along with Harry Alford, President and CEO of the National Black Chamber of Commerce, Ishmael Muhammad, an attorney with the Advancement Project and Barbara Arnwine, Executive Director for the Lawyers Committee on Civil Rights.

What played out over that 110 minutes was an example of what has become the substance of the ongoing conversation between white and black America. The four black witnesses spoke of the federal government’s tardy response to the August 29, 2005 landfall of Hurricane Katrina as being an unmistakable sign of racism on the part of the white majority. The white members of the committee were left to play the role of apologists for the not only the government, but for white America in general. (Former Georgia Representative Cynthia McKinney was the only African American congresswoman in attendance and the lone Democrat who broke her party’s boycott of the hearings.)

For their part, the witnesses testified to such things as New Orleans police officers providing security for "open-air" crack houses, physical and sexual assaults on evacuees by National Guard troops and cold-blooded murder. Neither the lack of even circumstantial evidence nor the fact that this alleged activity escaped the attention of the mainstream media that swarmed around New Orleans caused the witnesses any apparent concern; to them, this was not about ascertaining facts. This was about the transfer of responsibility for the circumstances of the Katrina victims from blacks to whites.

In the days following Katrina, Representative McKinney was more than anxious to get in on the act. The September 8, 2005 Congressional Record reports that Ms. McKinney spoke to her feelings on the government’s response to Katrina, as well as the social, economic and emotional gulfs that separate the races.

Hurricane Katrina washed away America’s veneer of populist opportunity, a country that has overcome its racist, slave-holding past, a country ready for world dominion because it has learned how to uplift the human spirit at home. Katrina, in images as stark and undeniable as could be, has laid bare the Republican lie that its policies promote growth and prosperity for all Americans and leave no child left behind, while Katrina put into our living rooms and the world’s living rooms the cruel hoax that has been played on America and those who love America by the ruthless sybaritic power player elites who are as responsible for the conditions endured by too many Americans as they are for the embarrassing and breathtaking incompetencies we all witnessed just before Labor Day.

As is de rigueur for Democrats, Representative McKinney went on to weave a tale of agony and despair, as she shared statistics on increased poverty and economic disparity in America. What escaped mention by Ms. McKinney was that almost all of what befell the residents of New Orleans during Katrina reflected the miserable living conditions of the residents prior to Katrina. After decades of governance by black mayors - Democrats all - the government of New Orleans was a cesspool of waste and corruption, and its citizenry paid the cost in poverty, economic stagnation and a diminished state of general welfare.

On the subject of Katrina, let us be clear about one thing as it regards the hurricane and its aftermath. Returing to Dr. Thomas Sowell's main argument in Black Rednecks and White Liberals (previously discussed elsewhere), the level of poverty and depravity that served as a full-frontal obscenity had nothing whatsoever to do with race or racism. It was evidence of neither an innate black inferiority nor a systemic, all-pervasive bias against African Americans or the poor. Indeed, what we saw had everything to do with the culture of the citizens of New Orleans and its environs. Perhaps unintentionally, Sen. Barack Obama seemed to concede as much in a September 6, 2005 speech on the Senate floor.

I hope we realize that the people of New Orleans weren’t just abandoned during the hurricane. They were abandoned long ago to murder and mayhem in the streets, to substandard schools, to dilapidated housing, to inadequate health care, to a pervasive sense of hopelessness.

Sen. Obama intended to make the point that government neglected its central role of seeing to the needs of the people of New Orleans prior to the hurricane’s devastation. But what was left unstated by the Senator was that before the people of New Orleans were "abandoned" by all levels of government, they themselves abandoned the necessary business of maintaining a culture that placed a premium on accountable government, educational excellence, a well-cared for population and a civil society. It is not entirely surprising that my Senator was not more direct in stating as much, as one of the original misconceptions of liberalism is that which posits that all cultures are essentially the same, no matter their level of functioning.

It is beyond debate that the residents of New Orleans were poorly served by the state and federal governments in the aftermath of Katrina. But is also true that much of what occurred after the levies were breached resulted from a pre-existing local culture that saw no harm in predatory politicians, unaccountable government, ineffectual or corrupt law enforcement, diminished educational opportunity, and a moribund local economy that resulted in an intensity of lack more reminiscent of Haiti than of the United States. Even with the massive depopulation occasioned by Katrina, the murder rate in New Orleans remains several times the national average. If we are to take anything from the re-election of New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin in May 2006, it appears that such a situation is preferred by the citizens of New Orleans.

In as much as the previously discussed Cloward-Piven experiment established the paradigm of "protest and demand" as the primary means of upward mobility for blacks, it has robbed the black community of the most reliable tools for socio-economic betterment: personal initiative, achievement and self-reliance, which would have inevitably led to the betterment of the race as a whole. The loss of these personal attributes in much of the African American underclass has in turn contributed to the development of a culture of complaint that is in evidence to a great extent in black America, as was on full display during those Katrina hearings.

Rather than revealing America’s indifference to blacks or the poor, Hurricane Katrina exposed the devastation that had already been inflicted upon New Orleanians through their own indifference to managing the culture that surrounded them. But the point to be made about all of this is that it was liberals, both black and white, who played an essential part in the development of this culture of apathy, dependence and underachievement. The Left, with its time-honored cults of victimization, inculcated attitudes and patterns of behavior that were at cross purposes with anything that resembled social uplift.

And so it is to be expected that the lives of African Americans who are mired in the underclass reflect both the effects of racial disparities (which may in fact be only coincidental to race versus being causally related) as well as the pervasive sense of entitlement. Although they certainly work in synergy, of the two, it is the entitlement mentality that is the more problematic, for its effects have come to surpass the more typical predictive factors such as household income and level of education. All of this, the lack of "equality" in matters of health, education and welfare, along with a perceived lack of efficacy amongst blacks in managing their affairs, both as individuals and collectively, leads to the hopelessness and chaos that is endemic in America’s inner cities.

Let Us Make Man, pt. 5 - And what now are we to make of liberal elites, black and white, who perpetuate the current sense of victimization and grievance amongst African Americans? To begin with, given the track record of both their policies and their misguided efforts, how do we explain their sway over the black community? Perhaps Drs. Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven can best explain the reasoning of those whose thinking they have so influenced.

The national Democratic leadership, however, is alert to the importance of the urban Negro vote, especially in national contests where the loyalty of other urban groups is weakening. Indeed, many of the legislative reforms of the Great Society can be understood as efforts, however feeble, to reinforce the allegiance of growing ghetto constituencies to the national Democratic Administration.

It appears that, even in the face of abject failure upon implementation, certain ideas die a slow death. Even now, after the reductions in both welfare rolls and child poverty that accrued from Republican sponsored welfare reform in 1996 (which passed only after being twice vetoed by President Clinton), the Left is unable to show any contrition or remorse for their reprehensible behavior towards the masses of blacks that they have exploited. Safely ensconced in her current position as Professor of Political Science and Sociology at The City University of New York, Dr. Piven, along with author Barbara Ehrenreich bemoan the demise of welfare in their article, "Who’s Utopian Now?" in the February 4, 2002 issue of The Nation.

We lost something else too: a crucial tool for improving the jobs that exist. An adequate welfare system, capable of supporting the unemployed at some level of dignity and safety, would enable the poor to turn down the most underpaid and abusive jobs. It would, in addition, empower more low-wage workers to take the risk of organizing, knowing that they could still survive even if they were fired. This in fact is what most irked employers about welfare-as-we-knew-it. And it is this aspect of welfare – as a protection for low-income parents and the working poor generally – that most urgently needs to be restored and defended.

Clearly, the deadliest sin of the modern Left is an arrogance that makes repentance or apology impossible. Here are two high priestesses of liberalism, not showing even the most infinitesimal amount of remorse for their destroying (at least) an entire generation of African Americans with their schemes. Rather, they lament that our government quite correctly made efforts to correct and reverse the damage that they intentionally wrought. They certainly seem to show no concern or remorse over the effects of their schemes on the lives of the "subjects" of their experiment.

A fair-minded reading of history informs us that the whole of the Civil Rights Movement, the actions of the NAACP, SNCC and the SCLC, the various marches, boycotts and sit-ins great and small, and all of the jailings, beatings and bombings that were endured, all of it was almost exclusively an effort on the part of a new American mainstream, black and white. Indeed, the courageous souls of every color and race who were involved in those efforts were of brave heart and sober mind. And with few noteworthy exceptions, none of the true heroes of the civil rights movement adopted the radical agenda of the countercultural Left; they most certainly were not Don Henley's "wild-eyed pistol wavers" or the brooding socialists of the counterculture.

The entire goal of the civil rights pioneers was that of equality of opportunity, not that of result. Those men and women understood that America was indeed a great nation and had only to live up to its full potential by improving its treatment of the truly oppressed. (It is true that towards the end of his life, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. flirted with the idea of some sort of guaranteed income for all citizens, but even then, his goal was not the violent overthrow or chaotic upending of American government.)

On the other hand, the efforts of 60s counterculturalists were primarily at the margins of the Civil Rights Movement, their behaviors being more focused on assuaging their own grievances than providing substantive benefit for the recipient. In addition to the counterproductive efforts of the NWRO, other leftists of that period worked with black and Hispanic street gangs, even though by then they had turned their specialties of violence and criminality into high art.

And as for integration, the counterculture’s efforts appear to have been confined to integrating the welfare rolls. If anything, the counterculture dedicated its efforts to disintegration of society through their promoting of a confrontational and oppositional mindset in themselves and in their hapless followers. Perhaps there is some sort of justice in the fact that even as the counterculturalists' efforts towards the expansion of AFDC programs led to the development of a culture that saw ordinary middle-class imperatives and responsibilities as foreign, so it is that the counterculturalists and their accomplices in the African American community who find themselves held hostage to their own culture of resentment and antipathy.

There are inconvenient truths that rest beneath the plain and obvious face of black dysfunction. The simple fact is that while some blacks appear to claim counterproductive behavior as a badge of honor, it is at least as likely that they do so as a psychological defense. By way of this device, more than a few African Americans have lost the need or impetus to confront their evident inability to compete with other races in any meaningful academic or socioeconomic endeavor. In this context, a sense of collective deficit would be appropriate, but for blacks, it is now largely absent. In fact, in measures of self-esteem, black students (including those who lag behind their peers academically) score higher in self-regard than children of other races. Clearly, this outsized sense of self is under girded by something other than scholastic achievement.

But there are also external factors that make black dysfunction seem necessary and even desirable in many quarters. There is a significant contingent in this country that sees the diminished status of African Americans as an indictment against American mores and values. Race-based discrepancies provide a rationale for those who would condemn America as an inherently racist nation. Liberals need black dysfunction at least as much as many blacks themselves do. As long as the phenomenon of blacks behaving badly is seen as something to be understood as a function of overt racism (or "structural impediments") as opposed to individual choice, African Americans and their liberal enablers will never need to examine themselves and their behavior. While this is not to say that black and white liberal elites are directly responsible for all that prevails in the black community, but it is clear that there is a symbiosis between the black underclass and liberal elites.

Because African Americans have been persuaded to use our history of oppression as a guarantee of entitlement as opposed to a source of resolve, we developed neither the desire nor the ability to transcend that history, and so we find ourselves constrained rather than transformed by it. Over time, the learned behavior within the black community has been to hold on to our grievance as if it were a life preserver, and shift any blame for our shortcomings as often as possible, as far as possible, to as many (white) people as possible.

Let Us Make Man, pt. 4 - In as much as the program advanced by Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven (previously discussed elsewhere) depended upon "a national Democratic administration [that] would be constrained to advance a federal solution to poverty" it achieved a modicum of success. Although their efforts never led to the implementation of any sort of guaranteed national income, they seemed to provide impetus for President Nixon to propose a Family Assistance Plan that would provide a guaranteed income of $1,600 to a typical family of four, along with up to $864 in food stamps. For his part, the National Welfare Rights Organization's (NWRO) George Wiley called the legislation "an act of political repression" noting that the $1,600 was insufficient. Their work definitely lead to an increase in welfare rolls across the country and significantly contributed to NYC’s declaring bankruptcy in 1975 (as by 1970-71, the city was budgeting nearly $1.8 billion for AFDC and Medicaid.) In a July 20, 1998 speech, then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani described the effectiveness of the Cloward-Piven strategy.

For a time welfare functioned, both around the nation and in New York City, as a bridge to self-sufficiency. It offered temporary help when people needed help but, as quickly and as reasonably as possible, a movement back to the workforce so that you can be your own self-sufficient human being. However, beginning in the sixties, the system began to expand rapidly. This happened around the country but most dramatically it happened in the City of New York. . . Between 1960 and 1967 the size of the welfare rolls more than tripled. The 1960s began with about 250,000 people on welfare; by 1968 there were 800,000 people on welfare. From that point forward it would never drop below 800,000 any day, any month, or any year between 1968 and February of this year.

This was not a period of economic depression. It wasn’t a period of economic decline. In fact, the mid-1960s to the late 1960s was some of our greatest boom periods in the history of this country. This is not an effect of our national or city economy. This is the result of policies and programs designed to have the maximum number of people get on welfare. This is the period of time in which it changed from a program of enablement, a program in which you would help people for a period of time and enable them to get back to taking care of themselves and their families, to the word entitlement – to a program of entitlement – and the effect of the change in philosophy from enablement to entitlement was maybe 700,000 to 800,000 to 900,000 to maybe a million additional people on welfare than had been the case before.

The damage done during this period of American history, and the carelessness with which this program was engaged, cannot be overlooked or overstated. Here you had a pair of privileged white elites whose only concern was to create economic havoc for the federal government in order to encourage some form of guaranteed income for all Americans. And in order to achieve this end, they were willing to use millions of faceless and ultimately powerless blacks as implements. As one reads A Strategy to End Poverty, two things become apparent. First, one is struck by Cloward and Piven’s temerity in that they would presume to be able to single-handedly eradicate poverty in America. But secondly, it becomes clear that Cloward and Piven gave no thought to the long term effects of their scheme.

Theirs was not a plan designed to improve the educational, political of social standing of the poor. To Cloward and Piven, inner city blacks were just another one of the "elements in the big-city Democratic coalition." By putting their plan into effect, Richard Cloward, Frances Fox Piven, George Wiley and the entire NWRO organization expanded the reach and impact of the welfare system into the lives of impoverished blacks. And by widening the scope of a program that "hunted after-hours for a man in the house," the Cloward-Piven experiment contributed terribly to the breakup of untold millions of poor and minority families by depriving them of the benefits of a consistent male presence.

In so doing, Cloward and Piven’s experiment did seemingly irreparable damage to the body politic of America. It effectively brought about the end of the civil rights movement as a force for moral excellence, and brought about the advent of the "civil wrongs" movement. Whereas the civil rights struggle was about equality and empowerment, the civil wrongs movement has everything to do with avoidance of responsibility and a sense of entitlement, the results of which are evident in many benighted communities yet today. And the NWRO's part in all of this is not confined to the 1960s. At George Wiley’s direction, organizers in Little Rock began the development of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). The goal of ACORN was to expand the NWRO's constituency beyond minorities and welfare recipients, to include the working poor and unemployed, veterans and schoolchildren.†

In their attempts to incite at social upheaval by any means necessary, Cloward and Piven attempted to contravene an often under-appreciated imperative for those striving for upward mobility. That is, before one can enter the middle class economically, one must first enter it behaviorally. As generations of teenage minimum-wage earning burger flippers will attest, it is important to learn the middle class habits of responsibility, dependability and self-motivation at a formative age. By breaking the linkages between labor and reward for millions of impoverished people, the Cloward-Piven experiment created a disincentive against middle class behavior, thereby entrenching the poor into self destructive behaviors.

† Unfortunately, ACORN never abandoned its roots in the welfare-rights agenda. With offices in over 100 cities in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, ACORN has had one of its latest successes in its "Living Wage" campaign, claiming recent victories in Florida, New Jersey, New Mexico and Illinois. Predictably, it has served largely as an adjunct of the Democratic Party, with former senator John Edwards helping to kick off its minimum wage ballot initiative in June 2006. The irony is that when California regulators sued ACORN for not paying its own workers the minimum wage, ACORN argued that such regulations were unconstitutional "because they restrict ACORN’s ability to engage in political advocacy."

Let Us Make Man, pt. 3 - In our post-welfare reform society, the notion of welfare being a "right" is quaint, almost to the point of being absurd. But such was the vision put forward by Richard Cloward, Frances Fox Piven and George Wiley, along with the activists of the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO). According to John McWhorter (who is discussed elsewhere), the NWRO "openly encouraged as many people as possible to be given [Aid to Families with Dependent Children] payments, hoping that this would bankrupt the government and force a complete overhaul of our distribution of income." In fact, Cloward and Piven concede as much in a widely cited redux of their 1965 paper, published in the May 2, 1966 issue of The Nation, this time entitled "The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty."

It is our purpose to advance a strategy which affords the basis for a convergence of civil rights organizations, militant anti-poverty groups and the poor. If this strategy were implemented, a political crisis would result that could lead to legislation for a guaranteed annual income and thus an end poverty.

This strategy is based on the fact that a vast discrepancy exists between the benefits to which people are entitled under public welfare programs and the sums which they actually receive…It is widely known...that nearly 8 million persons (half of them white) now subsist on welfare, but it is not generally known that for every person on the rolls at least one more probably meets existing criteria of eligibility but is not obtaining assistance.

The discrepancy is not an accident stemming from bureaucratic inefficiency; rather it is an integral feature of the welfare system which, if challenged, would precipitate a profound financial and political crisis. The force for that challenge, and the strategy we propose, is a massive drive to recruit the poor onto the welfare rolls.

A series of welfare drives in large cities would, we believe, impel action on a new federal program to distribute income, eliminating the present public welfare system and alleviating the abject poverty which it perpetuates.

By 1970, the NWRO claimed to have a budget of $500,000 and a membership of 100,000, most of them black and female. In implementing their strategy, the NWRO mobilized "cadres of aggressive organizers" to create a climate of fear and intimidation through increased militancy in urban areas. For example, the New York City NWRO affiliate organization, Concerned Parents for Adequate Welfare, staged daily protests at welfare offices throughout the city. Occasionally, their activities turned destructive, as the New York Times Magazine noted on September 27, 1970 in an article entitled, "Now It’s Welfare Lib."

There have been sit-ins in legislative chambers, including a United States Senate committee hearing, mass demonstrations of several thousand welfare recipients, school boycotts, picket lines, mounted police, tear gas, arrests – and on occasion, rock throwing, smashed glass, overturned desks, scattered papers and ripped out phones.

There was a takeover of the office of former [Health, Education and Welfare] Secretary Robert H. Finch, during which Mrs. Beulah Sanders, NWRO’s first vice chairman and chairman of New York’s Citywide Coordinating Committee of Welfare Groups, sat in Mr. Finch’s leather chair for seven hours of "liberation" with the title of "Acting HEW Secretary."

But as the article goes on to point out, as part of its multi-pronged strategy, the NWRO also worked with other organizations in order to establish "rights" for welfare recipients by means of the legal system.

The three-year old NWRO played a significant role in bringing about the new welfare era. But the lead actors who substantially established the legal concept of welfare as a right, according to Columbia University public-welfare experts Richard A. Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, were the Office of Economic Opportunity lawyers, often working with NWRO who have toiled since the mid-sixties aiding low-income people and creating a new "poor law."

A number of welfare-rights cases have reached the Supreme Court. The lawyers have succeeded in knocking out state residence requirements, which forced those who moved from one state to another to do without benefits for as long as a year. They have eliminated harsh substitute-parent rules, which denied welfare to a mother who, for instance, was caught with a man in her home after being abandoned by her husband. And they ended the so-called "midnight raids," in which welfare investigators hunted after-hours for a man in the house.

More to come...

Let Us Make Man, pt. 2 - Looking at the history of Africans in America, prior to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, most blacks were laboring under the delayed effects of the slavery experience. According to the Hoover Institution’s Dr. Thomas Sowell, chief among these effects was the exposure of black Africans to what he calls "redneck culture," or the culture of the descendants of the peoples of the Scottish highlands and the northern borderlands of England, who migrated across the Atlantic to the South. In his book, Black Rednecks and White Liberals, Dr. Sowell describes the culture and behavior of these whites.

The cultural values and social patterns prevalent among Southern whites included an aversion to work, proneness to violence, neglect of education, sexual promiscuity, improvidence, drunkenness, lack of entrepreneurship, reckless searches for excitement, lively music and dance, and a style of religious oratory marked by strident rhetoric, unbridled emotions, and flamboyant imagery...Touchy pride, vanity and boastful self-dramatization were also part of this redneck culture among people from the regions of Britain where the civilization was the least developed. "They boast and lack self-restraint," [Fredrick] Olmsted said, after observing their descendants in the American antebellum South.

Dr. Sowell contends that the history of the culture of Southern whites and their ancestors "has contemporary significance because of its influence on the economic and social evolution of vast numbers of people" and "its continuing influence on the lives and deaths of a residual population in America’s black ghettos." He also points out the painful irony that much of what is portrayed as an authentic and distinctive black identity is nothing more than "part of a centuries-old pattern among the whites in whose midst generations of blacks lived in the South." (That fact makes me openly wonder what would have happened if West Africans were captured and enslaved by Germans.)

Later in his book, Dr. Sowell describes many of the gains that black Americans were able to achieve post-slavery, particularly in the area of education. His sense, and that of many others, seems to be that had this progress gone uninterrupted, a near parity might have been achieved between the black and white communities in overall quality of life. Most unfortunately, that trend was indeed interrupted. In this case, the interruption was provided by none other than the over-educated and under-occupied neo-Socialists of the Left, and it appears that the links between black liberals and white counterculture elites were forged in the mid-1960s. Some of the history of specific interactions between leaders of the counterculture and the black community is detailed in John McWhorter's Winning the Race.

An important contribution of McWhorter's work is that where Charles Murray would argue in his 1984 book, Losing Ground, that black welfare recipients made economic analyses regarding the "rewards and penalties" of welfare versus work, McWhorter contends that most poor blacks were not doing anything of the sort. McWhorter suggests that the main drivers of intergenerational poverty and dysfunction were not economic, but cultural, that being a culture of what he calls "therapeutic alienation" from all behaviors seen as stereotypically "white," to include the worlds of work and education.†

McWhorter further maintains that this disengagement roughly coincided with changes in welfare eligibility, and preceded the underclass' descent into an abyss of dependency, crime and illegitimacy. In any event, both authors agree that once labor was decoupled from reward, human nature kicked in to create a powerful disincentive against work. In his book, McWhorter describes the efforts of a privileged white minority to damage America's political structure for their own purposes, using poor blacks as blunt instruments.

Especially effective was the National Welfare Rights Organization, led by former chemist George Wiley and Columbia University social work professors Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, guiding troops of activists who were mostly black women. Rarely in American history have people with such an openly radical, and even destructive, agenda had such power over the daily lives of innocent people.

Although Frances Fox Piven and the late Richard Cloward are not well known outside of the social science community, this husband-and-wife team wielded tremendous influence through their writings and activism. Dr. Cloward was awarded his Doctorate in Sociology from Columbia University in 1958 and Dr. Piven received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1962. Together, they co-authored several books and papers that informed progressive's discussion of issues related to poverty and electoral politics, to include a 1965 paper entitled "Mobilizing the Poor: How It Can Be Done" and a 1971 book "Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare." In 1966, Cloward and Wiley co-founded the National Welfare Rights Organization in Washington, D.C., with Wiley serving as the executive director. (Prior to his involvement with the NWRO, Dr. Wiley was a chemistry professor at Syracuse University, as well as associate director of the Congress of Racial Equality.)

More to come...

†The therapeutic alienation that McWhorter describes is perhaps equal parts a manifestation of the overall balkanizing effect of liberalism, and black America’s seemingly necessary rejection of what W.E.B. DuBois described in his 1903 classic Souls of Black Folk as "this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity."