Cloward-Piven Everywhere

Cloward-Piven Everywhere

              Posted By Ed Driscoll On July 11, 2014 @ 11:51 am In Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal,Liberal Fascism,Oh, That Liberal Media!,The Future and its Enemies,The Return of the Primitive | 29 Comments


“The Obama administration-driven calamity at this nation’s southern border is no naiveté-caused accident,” Tom Blumer wrote on June 24th at PJM. “Instead, it’s the latest manifestation of what clear-eyed observers must recognize is just one of many concerted attempts to overwhelm this nation’s institutions and its social, psychological and physical infrastructure for the apparent purpose of leaving it permanently weakened and fundamentally changed.” As Tom concluded:

For all practical purposes, Cloward-Piven is now a staple of leftist electoral campaign strategy. As one commenter recently noted (I unfortunately lost track of where it originated), the Obama reelection campaign’s 2012 strategy “wasn’t just to publish propaganda, but to publish (and) distribute propaganda in such magnitudes that that folks didn’t even have to think about it, they would just foam at the mouth at the mere mention of (Mitt) Romney’s name.”

As to the recent wave of “Unaccompanied Alien Children” — that’s the Department of Homeland Security’s term, not mine — make no mistake. President Barack Obama and his advisers had to know that hordes of unaccompanied children would be sent to cross our southern border when he unilaterally imposed “Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals” in June of 2012. Despite seeing its results, Homeland Security renewed DACA for two more years earlier this month. The default assumption simply must be that “Obama is using these children as pawns to implement his goal of universal citizenship for illegal immigrants.”

In other words, it’s Cloward-Piven, yet again.

Flash-forward to yesterday at Comcast-owned MSNBC, and as Noah Rothman writes at Hot Air, “Bloomberg View columnist Francis Wilkinson is apparently thrilled about the worst humanitarian crisis to impact the United States in years. Why? Let’s check his latest column which piqued the interest of MSNBC’s bookers.” Once on the set of MSNBC, Wilkinson really let his Cloward-Piven freak flag proudly fly:

Appearing on MSNBC to discuss his thesis, Wilkinson went a step further than he did in his column. In this segment, he suggested that Obama “wants” the present crisis, and he wants it to be a “big” one.

“I think he wants this to be a big problem,” Wilkinson told the hosts of MSNBC’s The Cycle on Thursday. “I think he wants this to be such big problem right now that Congress has to deal with it, and that the media’s focused on it, and that the American public is focused on it.”

The Bloomberg View columnist added that the GOP’s “nativist” streak is stronger than their hatred for the president, so they will cave to an immigration reform proposal if it is sufficiently focused on border protection.

“I think he wanted a big splash. I think he wanted a big story,” Wilkinson continued. “And I think he needs a big story and a big splash in order to force a resolution of the border.”

In the Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan concurs:

There is every sign he let the crisis on the border build to put heat on Republicans and make them pass his idea of good immigration reform. It would be “comprehensive,” meaning huge, impenetrable and probably full of mischief. His base wants it. It would no doubt benefit the Democratic Party in the long term.

The little children in great danger, holding hands, staring blankly ahead, are pawns in a larger game. That game is run by adults. How cold do you have to be to use children in this way?

Which on one level is pretty rich considering that the Wall Street Journal has been calling for open borders for years — to the point of shaming conservatives who supported tighter controls over immigration, but these are still valid points, made by a former White House insider who can’t believe she once supported such a dysfunctional president.

Which brings us to Peter Wehner at Commentary on “Obama’s Psychological Tapestry”:

We’re facing a humanitarian crisis on our southern border, caused in very large part by the president’s June 2012 order halting the deportation of young illegal immigrants. (The number of children who have surged across the border in the last eight months is ten times what it was in 2012.) And what is the president’s response? “Barack Obama goes after Republicans on immigration,” according to a Politico headline. Over at hotair.com Noah Rothman does a nice job documenting the president’s blame shifting. And an exasperated House Speaker John Boehner said on Thursday, “He’s been president for five-and-a-half years. When’s he going to take responsibility for something?”

It looks very much like the answer is never. And the reason may well lie in Mr. Obama’s psychological makeup. Let me explain what I mean.

Early on with Mr. Obama, I assumed his chronic finger pointing was simply cynical. It may be that in part, but it seems to me to be more than that. It’s one thread in a larger psychological tapestry.

The president is a man who has a grandiose sense of himself, a very strong sense of entitlement, and is, even for a politician, unusually prickly and self-pitying. He is blind to the damage he’s doing and the failures he’s amassed. His self-conception–pragmatic, empirical, non-ideological, self-reflective, willing to listen to and work with others, intellectually honest, competent at governing–is at odds with reality. Mr. Obama is constantly projecting his own weaknesses onto his political opponents. There are never any honest differences with Obama; he is always impugning the motives of his critics–they put “party ahead of country”–while presenting his own motives as being as pure as the new-driven snow. And whatever goes wrong on his watch is always the result of someone or something else. There’s a kind of impressive consistency to Obama’s blame game. It never rests, and it applies to every conceivable circumstance.

The result of these calamities, Victor Davis Hanson writes, means that it’s “Our Roost, Obama’s Chickens”:

Meanwhile, as Obama has refused to enforce immigration law, the result is chaos. Tens of thousands of children are flooding across our border illegally, on the scent of Obama’s executive-order amnesties. Advocates of open borders, such as progressive grandees Mark Zuckerberg and Nancy Pelosi, assume that these impoverished Third World children will not enroll in the private academies attended by their children or grandchildren, or need housing in one of their vacation estates, or crowd their specialists’ waiting rooms. They do not worry about the effects of illegal immigration on the wages of low-income Americans. Dealing first-hand with the ramifications of open borders is for unenlightened, illiberal little people.

Obama’s economic legacy is rarely appreciated. He has institutionalized the idea that unemployment between 6 and 7 percent is normal, that annual deficits over $500 billion reflect frugality, that soaring power, food, and fuel costs are not proof of inflation, that zero interest rates are the reward for thrift, that higher taxes are always a beginning, never an end, and that there is no contradiction when elite progressives — the Obamas, the Clintons, the Warrens — trash the 1-percenters, while doing everything in their power to live just like them.

“We are the roost and, to paraphrase the president’s former spiritual adviser, Obama’s chickens are now coming home to us,” VDH concludes. (And just think, two and a half more years of further American collapse to come.) All of which was entirely predictable to anyone who didn’t drink the Kool-Aid in 2008 — and according to a group of pundits as diverse as Blumer, Wilkinson, Noonan, Wehner and VDH, on one level or another, by design.



Update: Even more “fun,” Cloward-Piven style! “Homeland Secretary: Agency That Removes [Illegal] Immigrants Will Be Out Of Money By Mid-September At ‘Current Burn Rate.’”
(H/T: Ace.)

Article printed from Ed Driscoll: http://pjmedia.com/eddriscoll
URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/eddriscoll/2014/07/11/cloward-piven-everywhere/