Crashing the System

[Coelacanth]

A couple years back, there were some threads about Obama's more obscure intellectual influences, and whether or not he was a ideological disciple of men like Saul Alinsky, or James Cone, or Frank Marshall Davis. At that time, the idea of "crashing the system" (bringing about revolutionary change by means of overburdening the nation's commitment to the social service and welfare apparatus) was also discussed.

I'm wondering what that discussion looks like today, now that more time has passed, and in light of the last 36 months or so of Obama's presidency. Back then I thought it likely that Obama was sympathetic to communism, and I felt there was at least some chance that he was at heart a communist himself. Today, I'm even more inclined to think in that direction: I'm pretty well convinced he is sympathetic, and I feel it's as likely as not that he is a communist.

So, is Obama trying to crash the system?

Or, maybe let's consider it from another angle: If a president was in fact trying to crash the system, then could he have gone about that activity more efficiently and more effectively than Obama has done? And if so, how?

 

[Bevo Incognito]

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[Coelacanth]

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[Bevo Incognito]

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[Lake_Travis_Horn]

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[Uninformed]

The Link

The Cloward–Piven strategy is a political strategy outlined in 1966 by American sociologists and political activists Richard Cloward (1926–2001) and Frances Fox Piven (b. 1932) that called for overloading the U.S. public welfare system in order to precipitate a crisis that would lead to a replacement of the welfare system with a national system of "a guaranteed annual income and thus an end to poverty". Cloward and Piven were a married couple who were both professors at the Columbia University School of Social Work. The strategy was formulated in a May 1966 article in liberal magazine The Nation titled "The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty".

The two were critical of the public welfare system, and their strategy called for overloading that system to force a different set of policies to address poverty. They stated that many Americans who were eligible for welfare were not receiving benefits, and that a welfare enrollment drive would strain local budgets, precipitating a crisis at the state and local levels that would be a wake-up call for the federal government, particularly the Democratic Party, thus forcing it to implement a national solution to poverty. Cloward and Piven wrote that “the ultimate objective of this strategy [would be] to wipe out poverty by establishing a guaranteed annual income...” There would also be side consequences of this strategy, according to Cloward and Piven. These would include: easing the plight of the poor in the short-term (through their participation in the welfare system); shoring up support for the national Democratic Party then-splintered by pluralistic interests (through its cultivation of poor and minority constituencies by implementing a national "solution" to poverty); and relieving local governments of the financially and politically onerous burdens of public welfare (through a national "solution" to poverty).