Trevor Loudon
New Zeal
6/26/2010
Cross posted from KeyWiki Blog
Many commentators on the U.S. left have tried to minimize the significance and importance of the Cloward-Piven Strategy, made famous by writer James Simpson and TV personality Glenn Beck.
According to Simpson and Beck, Columbia University sociologists, husband and wife team Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, devised a strategy in the early 1960s, to crash the U.S. economy and bring on socialist revolution by deliberately overloading state welfare rolls to the point of bankruptcy.
Many on the left regard this hypotheses as gross exaggeration at best, deliberate misrepresentation at worst.
Cloward and Piven outlined their strategy at the Second Annual Socialist Scholars Conference , held September 9-11, 1966 at the Hotel Commodore, New York, in a panel entitled;
“Poverty and Powerlessness Organizing the Poor: Can it Be Done?”
Below is an eye witness report on this historic panel written by conservative journalist Alice Widener – a highly regarded authority on the U.S. left of the day. The report appeared in Widener’s USA Magazine, September 16, 1966, page 28 and 29.
Read it and judge for yourself Cloward and Piven’s intentions…
The rest is at New Zeal.
