Cloward And Piven Strategy

The financial crisis continuing to brew in America is part of a deliberate strategy to expand the size and scope of government, Glenn Beck argued on his TV show.

It's called the Cloward And Piven Strategy of orchestrated crisis. It's 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." They called for "a massive drive to recruit the poor onto the welfare rolls" in an effort to overwhelm the system.

The strategy helped to push New York City to the brink of bankruptcy in 1975. Years later, then-mayor Rudy Giuliani, denounced the academic activists by name.

In the Nation article, Cloward and Piven made it clear that they were irritated that plenty of Americans legally eligible to receive forcibly redistributed wealth hadn't bothered to ask for handouts. They wrote:

"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."

One of the leftist activist groups that contributed to the current economic climate is ACORN. Its founder, Wade Rathke, is a big believer in the Cloward And Piven Strategy but he's given it a new name for a new millennium. He calls it the Maximum Eligible Participation Strategy and has said he wants to use the Internet to swamp America's social welfare system.

Although the Cloward And Piven Strategy pertains specifically to welfare benefits, the basic idea is that any massively unsustainable financial demands on the government will cause chaos and civil unrest.

Policy makers in Washington either want to cause crisis in order to overthrow the existing system or they simply don't care. What else could explain the jaw-dropping fiscal irresponsibility in Washington?

Couple this with the fact that in the closing weeks of the Bush administration, incoming White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel practically admitted the Obama administration was planning to sabotage America in order to force socialism upon the American people:

Rule one: Never allow a crisis to go to waste. They are opportunities to do big things.

A massive increase in the money supply takes roughly two years to cause inflation or hyperinflation in the economy. In the 1970s the government printed money like crazy and added 13% more to the money supply over two years. This caused an inflation rate of 12%.

The Federal Reserve chairman at the time, Paul Volcker, had to raise interest rates in order to stem inflation. He raised interest rates to 20%.

But, Beck noted, the money supply in the U.S. has been increased by 120% in the last year or so in order to meet the impossible demands of a reckless president and Congress.

How high will our interest rates have to rise to in order to tame the inflation that is about to be unleashed? Will those brutal interest rates snuff out economic growth?