They’re Baaack: How Neoconservatives are Responsible for the Tea Party's ‘Obama is a Socialist’ Meme

[Emit]

According to the Tea Party ‘Patriots,’ Obama is an evil Socialist who wants to destroy Capitalism through orchestrated crisis and redistribute your wealth. He has connections to militant black organizers and other radicals who want to destroy America, and there is a huge continuing conspiracy on the left, first resurrected by Socialists in the ‘60s, to hasten the fall of capitalism through crisis strategy in an effort to usher in Socialism. This is what is driving the Tea Partiers, and why the Tea Party ‘Patriots’ believe Obama is a danger to our country. This is why they are so motivated to “take our country back.”

First let’s revisit one of the basic tenets of Strauss, the father of neo-conservatism: “Strauss thinks that a political order can be stable only if it is united by an external threat; and following Machiavelli, he maintains that if no external threat exists, then one has to be manufactured.”

The 'Obama is a Socialist intent on destroying America' meme is a ‘manufactured threat.’

Joseph Farah, World Net Daily, at the Tea party Convention, introduced the “The Cloward-Piven Strategy to implement socialist revolution.” Having only briefly heard of this in passing once on Rush’s radio talk show, I never paid much attention, and while I am apt to listen to Rush and Hannity on occasion, and to visit various right wing websites just to hear what they are up to, I missed this one. I had wondered in all sincerity how the right so quickly glommed onto to Socialist meme in such a short period of time into Obama’s presidency.

Tracing the Tea Party’s Socialist Meme Leads to Neoconservatives David Horowitz and Sol Stern

Researching the route of this conspiracy, wading through numerous web entries, the majority of which are somehow affiliated with Tea Party movement and/or right wing sites, all lead to two sources: David Horowitz and Sol Stern.

These two go way back, having worked together on Ramparts, a publication that Stern calls the flagship publication of the New Left, of which he had been an editor. Both fancied themselves radical members of the New Left back in the ‘60s, and, like many neoconservatives, felt the left had abandoned them, so they joined ranks with right wing forces.

Stern’s hit piece on ACORN appeared back in 2003:

ACORN’s Nutty Regime for Cities, Sol Stern

It is no surprise that ACORN preaches a New Left–inspired gospel, since it grew out of one of the New Left’s silliest and most destructive groups, the National Welfare Rights Organization. In the mid-sixties, founder George Wiley forged an army of tens of thousands of single minority mothers, whom he sent out to disrupt welfare offices through sit-ins and demonstrations demanding an end to the “oppressive” eligibility restrictions that kept down the welfare rolls. His aim: to flood the welfare system with so many clients that it would burst, creating a crisis that, he believed, would force a radical restructuring of America’s unjust capitalist economy.

The flooding succeeded beyond Wiley’s wildest dreams. From 1965 to 1974, the number of single-parent households on welfare soared from 4.3 million to 10.8 million, despite mostly flush economic times. By the early 1970s, one person was on the welfare rolls in New York City for every two working in the city’s private economy. Yet far from sparking a restructuring of American capitalism, this explosion of the welfare rolls only helped to create a culture of family disintegration and dependency in inner-city neighborhoods, with rampant illegitimacy, crime, school failure, drug abuse, non-work, and poverty among a fast-growing underclass.

~snip~

ACORN founder George Wiley violated that oath when he used the poor as cannon fodder in a misbegotten scheme to throw the capitalist political economy into crisis. Decades later, ACORN leaders are again violating it when they promote an urban economic agenda that would snuff out economic opportunity, when they seek to derail welfare reform, and when they side with a monopolistic education system and its unionized employees against the right of poor families to send their children to schools that actually work. With friends like these, the urban poor don’t need enemies.

http://www.city-journal.org/html/13_2_acorns_nutty_regime.html

Horowitz’s entry is undated, but based on references to it, it appeared sometime between the fall of '05 and was resurrected in the fall of ’08 with claims that Obama and his radical associates are implementing this crisis strategy in an effort to destroy Capitalism and implement Socialism.

http://www.canadaka.net/forums/us-politics-f18/the-cloward-piven-strategy-to-implement-socialist-revolution-t8516.html">This entry was found dated Tue Sep 27, 2005, linking back to David Horowitz’s website, Discoverthenetworks.org: A Guide to the Political Left, the latter of which appears to have been updated to link Obama into the conspiracy.

According to Horowitz’s website entry, entitled The CLOWARD-PIVEN STRATEGY: SOCIAL CHANGE THROUGH ORCHESTRATED CRISIS:

…the "Cloward-Piven Strategy" seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.

Inspired by the August 1965 riots in the black district of Watts in Los Angeles (which erupted after police had used batons to subdue a black man suspected of drunk driving), Cloward and Piven published an article titled "The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty" in the May 2, 1966 issue of The Nation. Following its publication, The Nation sold an unprecedented 30,000 reprints. Activists were abuzz over the so-called "crisis strategy" or "Cloward-Piven Strategy," as it came to be called. Many were eager to put it into effect.

~snip~

Cloward and Piven recruited a militant black organizer named George Wiley to lead their new movement. In the summer of 1967, Wiley founded the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO). His tactics closely followed the recommendations set out in Cloward and Piven's article. His followers invaded welfare offices across the United States -- often violently -- bullying social workers and loudly demanding every penny to which the law "entitled" them. By 1969, NWRO claimed a dues-paying membership of 22,500 families, with 523 chapters across the nation.

Then on September 28, 2008, James Simpson of the American Thinker website, posted this article, referencing David Horowitz and his Discover the Networks.org and a Newsmax article by James H. Walsh, who is big on anti-immigration:

(James Simpson is also the author of this article, titled Ayers admits writing “Dreams From My Father” – American Thinker, claiming that Bill Ayers wrote Dreams From My Father.)

Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis

By James Simpson

Despite the mass media news blackout, a series of books, talk radio and the blogosphere have managed to expose Barack Obama's connections to his radical mentors -- Weather Underground bombers William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, Communist Party member Frank Marshall Davis and others. David Horowitz and his Discover the Networks.org have also contributed a wealth of information and have noted Obama's radical connections since the beginning.

~snip~

But even this doesn't fully describe the extreme nature of this candidate. He can be tied directly to a malevolent overarching strategy that has motivated many, if not all, of the most destructive radical leftist organizations in the United States since the 1960s.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/09/barack_obama_and_the_strategy.html

Simpson then goes on to describe The Cloward-Piven Strategy of Orchestrated Crisis referencing Horowitz, prefacing it with:

… Before the 1994 Republican takeover, Democrats had sixty years of virtually unbroken power in Congress - with substantial majorities most of the time. Can a group of smart people, studying issue after issue for years on end, with virtually unlimited resources at their command, not come up with a single policy that works? Why are they chronically incapable?

Why?

One of two things must be true. Either the Democrats are unfathomable idiots, who ignorantly pursue ever more destructive policies despite decades of contrary evidence, or they understand the consequences of their actions and relentlessly carry on anyway because they somehow benefit.
I submit to you they understand the consequences. For many it is simply a practical matter of eliciting votes from a targeted constituency at taxpayer expense; we lose a little, they gain a lot, and the politician keeps his job. But for others, the goal is more malevolent - the failure is deliberate. Don't laugh. This method not only has its proponents, it has a name: the Cloward-Piven Strategy. It describes their agenda, tactics, and long-term strategy.

He then ties Obama into the picture, providing a graphic to show Obama’s 'radical' connections:

Enter Barack Obama

In attempting to capture the significance of Barack Obama's Radical Left connections and his relation to the Cloward Piven strategy, I constructed following flow chart. It is by no means complete. There are simply too many radical individuals and organizations to include them all here. But these are perhaps the most significant.

Scary Stuff Indeed

To the undiscerning, this is scary stuff. Had the tables been turned and I had read something like this on a left leaning website during the Bush & Co. era, it may seem convincing.

Not being a good student of history, and having been born overseas during the '60s, I was not privy to the happenings of the civil unrest of the civil rights era. We must rely on historians to recapture the era, and so I decided to do a little digging into Mr. Cloward and his partner Frances Piven and the 'militant black organizer' George Wiley. I mean, they sound pretty scary according to Horowitz and the like.

Here's what I found.

According to his obituary in the New York Times, Richard A. Cloward was a fervent supporter of the poor and of voter rights, particularly of the rights of the underrepresented poor:

… A faculty member at the Columbia University School of Social Work from 1954 until his death, Dr. Cloward won numerous awards for his teaching and academic work, but he was equally well known for his efforts to influence social policy through grass-roots organizing and lobbying among the poor.

~snip~

Perhaps their most controversial writing was an article published in The Nation magazine in 1966, calling for "a massive drive to recruit the poor onto the rolls" as a means of forcing radical welfare reform. The article helped to foster the emergence of a more militant welfare rights movement, including the occupation of welfare offices in many cities and other acts of civil disobedience.

Critics have since argued that by encouraging both the expansion in the welfare rolls and the militancy that went with it, Dr. Cloward and Dr. Piven helped contribute to a political backlash against the welfare system and the decline of middle-class support for programs to help the poor.
But when asked about it in later years, Dr. Cloward was unapologetic.

"We knew that trouble was coming," he said in 1998 in an interview in The New York Times. "Our view is the poor don't win much, and they only win it episodically. You get what you can when you can get it."

~snip~

In "Regulating the Poor," Dr. Cloward and Dr. Piven analyzed the history of relief and public welfare systems, arguing that periodic rises in the welfare rolls helped the state to moderate disorder among poorer groups. In times of relative economic and political stability, the rolls would be shrunk to ensure a steady supply of low-wage labor for employers. In downturns, they said that the rolls would be deliberately expanded to prevent social disorder. Both controversial and entirely original, the book is still required reading for students of American politics and social policies, even as the analysis within it has remained well outside the political mainstream.

In the Reagan era of the 1980's, Dr. Cloward and Dr. Piven wrote several books that warned of a growing attack on the welfare state and drew attention to the decline of organized labor, including "The New Class War," published in 1982.

~snip~

"This is the kind of thing social scientists don't very often do," said Herbert Gans, a longtime friend and fellow professor of sociology at Columbia. "They actually invented social programs that became social policy. So he'll be remembered for a very long time after his death."

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/23/nyregion/richard-cloward-welfare-rights-leader-dies-at-74.html?scp=1&sq=Richard%20Cloward&st=cse

Here's a biography on Ms. Piven: http://asteria.fivecolleges.edu/findaids/sophiasmith/mnsss52_bioghist.html


In a The New York Times article from March 25, 1986, entitled POWER FOR THE POOR, Charlotte Curtis sheds some light on these two activists:

FRANCES FOX PIVEN and Richard A. Cloward simply won't give up. The two professors never forget that in an affluent nation the poor are powerless. They still seek ways to pull these people into the national decision-making process and they have been working toward that goal for 20 years.

When they - she, a political scientist, he, a sociologist and social worker - began to collaborate, their research indicated that many people who should be getting welfare were not. They figured reform would come when the poor themselves took the initiative. And that's what happened.

Welfare rolls were flooded. The war on poverty began. Power, or at least some power, came with participation. A theory and a strategy became the description of a reality. Then came the agonies of the Vietnam distraction, the backlash, a conservative turn, the ''me'' decade in which those who had seemed to care turned their attention inward , and Ronald Reagan. What is notable, Dr. Piven says, and she and Dr. Cloward foresaw it, is Registration, say scholars, should be simplified and taken directly to the people. that despite efforts to diminish the welfare state, it is ''battered, but mainly intact.''

~snip~

The scholars see the vote as the way to empower the poor. They want registration simplified and taken directly to the people, especially to welfare and unemployment offices and all the other governmental agencies that deal with the poor. To this end, in 1983 they helped found and are officers of the Human Serve Fund, ''serve'' being an acronym for Service Employee Registration and Voter Education.

~snip~

If the poor should actually follow through and vote in the high percentages of other registered groups, and, though arguable, the scholars are convinced they would, the national agenda could change, and change significantly. Lots of people, Democrats as well as Republicans, don't want that.

Copyright 1986 The New York Times Company, Retrieved February 6 2010 23:07:39, LexisNexis Academic Results



Cloward and Piven were prolific writers, advancing the cause of voter rights. One of their books was entitled, Why Americans Don't Vote. It is detailed in this The Washington Post article dated July 31, 1988, Sunday, Final Edition:

... this intriguing and troubling new book from Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward argues that Whittier's vision of American democracy no longer holds true. Today, the book says, the U.S. has a "class-skewed electorate." That is, about half of the adult population of the U.S. never votes -- and the nonvoters are generally the poor and disadvantaged. As a result, Piven and Cloward reach the dramatic conclusion that "the United States (is) not a democracy, in the elementary sense of an effective universal suffrage."

~snip~

The data underlying this contention are fairly familiar. A century ago, some 80 percent of all eligible voters (at that time, adult white males) regularly turned out for American presidential elections. But in the 20th century, turnout has dropped dramatically -- to about 55 percent in the last two presidential contests, with much lower rates in non-presidential years. The United States, the birthplace, beacon and bulwark of modern democracy, today ranks behind almost every other free country in terms of voter participation.

These figures have spawned all manner of postulating and theorizing in the political science community. The provocative thing about this new study is Piven and Cloward's contention that the disenfranchisement of half the country is a deliberate tool of economic and political "haves" to keep the have-nots out in the cold.

Through "class restrictions on the suffrage," the book says, "economic elites ensured that they would encounter little resistance as they moved to shape government policies in their interests." The authors suggest that the two major parties, for all their sanctimonious hype about "getting out the vote," were active participants in this anti-democratic movement because limited suffrage "ensured their stability and protected incumbents."

THE BOOK offers an interesting history of the legal changes that led to a stunning fall-off of participation rates at the start of this century. Some were malign, such as the poll taxes, the literacy tests, the grandfather clauses and the "fighting grandfather" clauses (you could register to vote if your grandfather had fought for the Confederacy) that southern legislatures thought up to keep blacks away from the ballot. Others were well-intentioned; northern reformers argued that "restricting the vote to the better sorts of people" would avoid turmoil and corruption in government.

It's important to get all the biases out on the table in studies like this one. As in their previous books, including The New Class War (1985), Piven and Cloward make it clear that they view things from the left edge of the political spectrum. They tend to see "economic elites" conspiring against working folks in almost every aspect of contemporary American life.

T.R. Reid, Denver Bureau chief, The Washington Post, retrieved February 6 2010 23:10:48, LexisNexis Academic Results


Interesting that the book review makes reference to Cloward and Piven having offered a history of attempts to suppress voting, using methods such as literacy tests, particularly of minorities and poor, considering http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=389&topic_id=7655699">Tea Party Speaker Tancredo suggested a return to literacy tests.

More on Americans Don't Vote:

Frances Fox Piven, coauthor with Richard A. Cloward of ''Why Americans Don't Vote,'' says complicated registration forms in some states are part of the problem. ''I have a PhD and I don't understand these forms,'' she said in an interview.

In their book, Ms. Piven and Mr. Cloward argue that there is much government obstruction to registration under the guise of maintaining a high-quality electorate and guarding against voter fraud.

They contend that politicians and local officials have conspired to lock people out, because they want the security of a stable pool of voters. New, unpredictable voters might jeopardize seats of incumbents, they say.

Christian Science Monitor (Boston, MA), May 5, 1988, retrieved February 6 2010 23:22:44, LexisNexis Academic Results





In their book entitled The New Class War: Reagan's Attack on the Welfare State and Its Consequences (March 12, 1982), Cloward and Piven attacked the hero of the right, Ronald Reagan:

Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward are well known as the welfare state's most persistent radical critics. In their previous works they argued convincingly that, unless accompanied by political power, welfare programs for the poor must be understood as instruments not of compassion but of control. Income maintenance, they wrote in ''Regulating the Poor'' (1971), has essentially two functions: assuring civil order and maintaining the discipline of work. Ever since the English poor laws (which date back to 1601), poor-relief schemes have been a balancing act performed by the ruling elite, designed to provide just enough charity to prevent mass unrest but on such unattractive terms that the able-bodied will choose low-wage work.

This thesis continues to inform Piven and Cloward's latest work, but with one notable revision. Historically, they argue, most poor relief still should be viewed as political control. But the modern welfare state represents a real shift of power to working people after all. And that, say Piven and Cloward, is what explains the force of the Reagan backlash. Today's welfare state, with its unemployment compensation, its pensions and its goal of full employment, cushions the discipline of the marketplace. The result is an erosion of corporate profits. Taxation and regulation cut the return on capital still further. Thus the Reagan counteratttack is simply ''part of a larger strategy'' to restore business profits, according to Piven and Cloward.

But Mr. Reagan's ''New Class War'' must ultimately fail, they contend, precisely because the modern welfare state has such a broad middle-class clientele. The social-service state is linked to a vast public through a dense web of agencies and entitlements. Since the 1930's, ''a century and a half after the achievement of formal democratic rights, the state has finally become the main arena of class conflict.''

Copyright 1982 The New York Times Company,retrieved February 6 2010 23:16:31, LexisNexis Academic Results


The couple was active in the rights of women, particularly the rights of women on welfare.

Here's an excerpt from early article from 1977 entitled THE WELFARE ENIGMA; Welfare Program Enigma: The Poor Always With Us; Despite All the Programs, Reforms and Billions, The Poor and Their Problems Will Not Go Away

Frances Fox Pixen (sic) and Richard A. Cloward, in their book "Regulating the Poor," trace a history of American "loathing" of people on relief. In our ideology, they observe, "the economic system is open, and economic success is a matter of individual merit (and sometimes luck)." It follows, therefore, that "those who fail - the very poor - are therefore morally or personally defective." Such failure won't go on forever. The Bible tells us, "Ye have the poor always with you." But that is not The American Way. Our poor are supposed to go away.

~snip~

Authors Piven and Cloward believe thatthe government used welfare as the total of appeasement for black welfare applicants because it could not meet other social demands without alienating whites. They write:

"In other words, while the Great Society agencies often attempted to make gains for blacks in housing and health care and education and employment, resistance was stiff and sometimes virulent, for other groups in the cities had major stakes in these services and resources. But there were few other major groups in the cities with direct and immediate interests in welfare. (Giving welfare was also cheaper, at least in the short run, than building housing, for example.) Consequently, relief-giving turned out to be the most expeditious way to deal with the political pressures created by a dislocated poor, just as it had been many times in the past."

The Washington Post, May 8, 1977, retrieved February 6 2010 23:54:17, LexisNexis Academic Results


Piven went up against William F. Buckley:

Don't blame welfare mothers for society's ills, FRANCES FOX PIVEN

Not long ago, I joined a Firing Line debate on the proposition that "Welfare does more harm than good." William Buckley led off with a story about his niece who lives in Paris. She has trouble finding household help, presumably because the help prefers welfare.

Then Buckley moved to his team's central claim: A moral rot is spreading in our society, revealed by rising delinquency, drug use, and dependency. The rot originates in the behavior of poor women who give birth to illegitimate children, encouraged and supported by government benefits. The remedy: Eliminate benefits, thereby forcing women to support themselves through work or marriage.

~snip~

Since Bill Buckley can't do anything about sin, he might reasonably ask what can be done about poverty. But he is too worried about getting good, cheap, household help - an objective he shares with a growing number of low-wage employers.

Buckley is not simply a cultural conservative, anxious to preserve traditional social forms. He is also a political conservative, committed to free-market doctrines that not only justify cutbacks in government social programs, but also justify reckless economic change, including the depletion of our industrial assets, massive layoffs through "streamlining," and declining wages.
Such wrenching economic change always leaves social disorder in its wake, which apologists like Buckley then blame on the immorality of the victims.

Still, after two hours of Firing Line debate leavened with smug male jokes at the expense of poor women, I am struck by how little evidence matters in talk about welfare. Stereotypes about the irresponsible poor are taken for granted, and too deeply etched.

St. Petersburg Times (Florida), May 8, 1994, retrieved February 6 2010 23:48:37, LexisNexis Academic Results


Here are Piven and Cloward's comments that preceded a series of lectures on the theme "Strengthening the Ties that Bind: Families in Transition":

... Piven and Cloward have explored the reasons women seek welfare - or, more important, why public assistance rolls expand and contract over time.

Piven, 63, is distinguished professor of political science at City University of New York. Cloward, 69, is on the faculty at the Columbia University School of Social Work. At tonight's discussion, Piven said they will dissect economic changes that have led to the recent push for welfare reform.

"This sort of obsessive concern with out-of-wedlock births and the single-parent family is very potent stuff," Piven said last week. "We want to try to explain this preoccupation with family values, with sex, and also with race."

Much of the furor over welfare stems, Piven said, from the anxiety many Americans feel over their own economic stability.

Corporate "downsizing" has forced millions of workers from their jobs - many of them high-paying, supposedly secure positions. The displaced often are forced to find low-paying, unskilled work, Piven said.

At the same time more women are being forced to enter the job market, "not as a result of their liberation, but as a result of male wages' falling," Piven said.

The hardest hit, Piven said, are male high school graduates, many of whom could have sought secure, well-paying factory jobs a generation earlier. "This is a group that has taken the worst pummeling in the labor market. That group has been really devastated.

"All this creates a huge reserve of anxiety," Piven said. "Since people don't see economic solutions - and political leaders are not offering economic solutions - people are very susceptible to political talks about sex and race and values, which are issues, by the way, that government can't do much about."

The call to traditional values is one result of workers' insecurity about their declining prospects, Piven said.

Part of that call is the demand for welfare mothers to pull their own weight. Much evidence suggests, for instance, that welfare recipients don't choose to have babies in order to collect more benefits. But the debate hasn't been influenced much by evidence, Piven insists.

"It's such an emotional issue," Piven said. "People have such deep preconceptions about it that evidence is not as persuasive as sweeping pronouncements about welfare and poor women."
Some have suggested, USF's Paulson noted, that Piven and Cloward's early activism led to the welfare explosion that many now wish to reform.

"You could make the case that they might be responsible, to some degree, to the current conservative reaction movement," said Paulson.

St. Petersburg Times (Florida), January 22, 1996, retrieved February 6 2010 23:17:48, LexisNexis Academic Results



The couple was supportive of Motor Voter legislation:

Richard Cloward, a campaigner for easier ballot access and co-author of Why Americans Don't Vote, said: '''Despite all the braying and the bullshit about this being a citadel of democracy, the universal right to vote is a struggle which is still being fought out here.''

An attempt by Democrats to simplify the rules for future elections - making registration automatic when you apply for a driving licence or welfare - failed last week. The so-called ''motor voter'' bill was originally vetoed by President Bush two months ago. The Senate failed by eight votes to reach the two-thirds majority needed to override the President.
The White House and Senate Republicans said the measure would increase voter fraud. They offered no evidence of how this might be so. More likely, they were acting from rational, if cynical, self-interest. Although some younger Republicans disagree, most Republicans cling to the reasonable view that a wider and poorer electorate would, in the long run, help the Democrats...

October 1, 1992, The US Presidential Elections: Silencing the poor of America, The INdependent (London), retrieved February 6 2010 23:46:36, LexisNexis Academic Results


George Wiley

It was difficult to find much information on Wiley. So much of it online links directly to Horowitz's and Stern's articles. Here's what I found:

The Washington Post

September 16, 1977, Friday, Final Edition

Saluting the Life of George Wiley

BYLINE: By Jacqueline Trescott

Reprinted from yesterday's late editions.
Around the room were blow-ups of the late George Wiley, the founder of the National Welfare Rights Organization, his arm raised in a gesture of urgency, his mouth at the verge of a victorious smile.

Standing by those images were many of the people who felt a kinship with the complex activist, people who lived on welfare, those who walked the picket lines, the writers who interpreted the cries against social injustices and the politicians who created legislation from those dreams.


"Not a day goes by that I don't think of George Wiley," said Johnnie Tillmon, one of the welfare mothers who inspired the chemist-turned-civil-rigths-activist in his call for economic justice, a call cut short by his death four years ago. She had traveled from Los Angeles to join in the celebration Wednesday of a new biography of Wiley, "A Passion for Equality," by Nick and Mary Lynn Kotz, two Washington writers....

retrieved February 7 2010 00:04:48, LexisNexis Academic Results


This was an interesting entry from the National Welfare Rights Union:

From the Co-President's Desk...
by Marian Kramer, Detroit, MI
October 2008

"There are many online posts these days about the relationship between the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) and the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO). Many social commentators on the Internet have correctly identified the former George Wiley as an instrumental organizer in the origin of both groups. However, ACORN (originally founded as the Arkansas Community Organizations for Reform Now) and the NWRO had significant differences in their leadership and organizing models.

The NWRO then—as with the National Welfare Rights Union (NWRU) now—put the victims of poverty in leadership positions where they advocated for themselves and the needs of other low-income families. The NWRO sought to protect and give a voice to poor women and children across the U.S. in a time when poor families were under attack. Today, the NWRU continues that mission through its local work in chapters across the country, and fights for the human rights and dignity of all victims of poverty.

We commend Senator Obama for his work as a community organizer in Chicago. We suggest that the commentary on these organizations would better be served by focusing on the outstanding needs of poor and low-income families and a national agenda to dismantle poverty."

More information about dismantling poverty in the U.S. can be found at "National Welfare Rights Union's Eight Position Points to Dismantle Poverty in the U.S.".....

http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:pHNnNg0ZH5EJ:www.nationalwru.org/+National+Welfare+Rights+Organization+ACORN&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us


According to a Wikipedia entry on the National Welfare Rights Organization, citing Bread or Justice:
Grassroots Organizing in the Welfare Rights Movement:

"...Wiley rejected Cloward and Piven’s strategy of flooding welfare rolls with new welfare recipients and instead favored a strategy of organizing current welfare recipients into pressure groups."

Here:

In August 1967, delegates from 67 local welfare rights organizations met in Washington, D.C. and adopted a constitution that was drafted by the PRAC staff and had been adopted by the NCC, thus forming the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO). The NCC made a place for itself within the NWRO as the main decision making body in the national structure of the organization. However, despite a nationwide organization, local welfare rights groups still retained nearly complete autonomy for their local actions(7).

During the first few months of the new movement, the NWRO narrowed its focus from attempting to create a movement that would encompass all poor people to concentrating on those individuals who receive public assistance. Welfare recipients were easily organizable and they had the greatest measureable performance within the movement. (8).

Also in the early stages of the movement, Wiley rejected Cloward and Piven’s strategy of flooding welfare rolls with new welfare recipients and instead favored a strategy of organizing current welfare recipients into pressure groups. Critics of the Cloward-Piven strategy argued that it was easier to create a welfare crisis than to bring about its resolution. Activists, who were mainly welfare recipients themselves with little political power, would be left amidst this crisis with the ability to do nothing about it. This move was also easier organizationally for the movement because it was strategically more difficult to identify those who were eligible for welfare than those who already received it, it was also more difficult to motivate welfare-eligible individuals to act than those who already received it, and it was easier to organize current recipients of welfare by offering them benefits such as supplementary welfare payments(9)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Welfare_Rights_Organization#cite_note-7

Here's what the George Wiley Center writes in memory of George Wiley:

That era resonated with the civil rights
struggle, Vietnam, the War on Poverty and names
for the ages, Martin Luther King Jr., John and
Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X, James Farmer and so
many more.

But for actor-playwright Pitts-Wiley, the
eye of that perfect storm was the late George
Wiley, a pioneering social activist.
“He was in a time.” Pitts-Wiley said, “in
which black leadership and particularly black male
leadership was being redefined.”

“Fair-skinned man from New England with
a New England way of speaking, an Ivy League
education, second or third generation African-
American.”

Today, Pitts-Wiley says, Wiley would be a
high-ranking official in the Obama administration.
But back then this chemistry professor championed
welfare reform that nobody wanted to touch
because it came with a stigma, Pitts-Wiley said,
and fought for the rights of welfare mothers as the
Vietnam War shredded countless families by
leaving thousands of young black men dead or
irretrievably damaged. Welfare rules restricting aid
to poor families with a man in the house
exacerbated the problem, he said.

Gradually, Pitts-Wiley has been peeling
away the multiple layers of his complex namesake
who grew up in Rhode Island and gave up his
tenured professorship at Syracuse University to
pursue the rights of others. Pitts-Wiley’s research,
initiated by the George Wiley Center, has been
fueled by a $2,000 grant from the Rhode Island
State Council on the Arts and two recent $2,000
mini-grants from the Rhode Island Council for the
Humanities, one to the center, the other to the
playwright.

Pitts-Wiley himself is in the eye of many a
storm. He was a member of the Trinity Repertory
Company for 18 years and is an interpreter of
African-American cultural history. He and his wife
Bernadet formed the Mixed Magic Theatre in
Pawtucket dedicated to presenting a diversity of
cultural and ethnic images and ideas on stage. This
fall he will teach at MIT on a Martin Luther King
Jr. Fellowship in a joint venture of the theater and
English departments.

His plate brims with new ideas, but his
desire to tell the George Wiley story drives him, a
perfect storm that he hopes to complete and share
with the larger community in a play next June.

http://www.georgewileycenter.org/newsltr.html

[spanone]

1. shit, that's more than my entire sunday paper

[Emit]

2. Well, I hope you and others take the time to wade through it all, spanone

and give me your feedback, please. It is an important subject, imho.

[rfranklin]

3. Very informative and factual...but most Americans are so brainwashed...

that they instinctively side with the uber-wealthy who exploit them and buy all the hogwash about how the United States is inherently better in all ways than any other nation even when the facts say it ain't so.

[Emit]

5. Thanks, just trying to balance out some of the rhetoric from the right

[sakabatou]

4. I'll bookmark and read later

[Emit]

7. Thanks, sakabatou

I know it's a long and dry post, but, it is an important topic, imho. My intent was to get some substance out there on Cloward and Piven as opposed to the way the Tea Party/Neocon/Rightwingers are portraying Piven and her late husband (and Obama) as evil Socialists bent on destroying America.

[Emit]

6. Corrected link, sorry, should've checked before my editing time expired

October 07, 2009
Ayers admits writing Dreams
By James Simpson


http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/10/ayers_admits_writing_dreams_1.html