Empowerment by manufactured crisis

Back in January 1973, National Lampoon sported a brilliant cover – probably the satirical magazine's most famous.

A cute black and white dog was the visual element, staring ominously at a revolver pointing at his head. The headline read: "If you don't buy this magazine, we'll kill this dog."

People bought the magazine in droves, not because they believed the editors of National Lampoon were really going to kill the dog, but because it was so funny.

It strikes me that Barack Obama and the Democrat-dominated Congress are governing along the same lines. The only difference? They're not joking.

Instead of putting guns to the heads of dogs, they are manufacturing crises they claim will result in the imminent destruction of the world as we know it and demanding we buy their solution or else.

It's an old trick really. If not invented a few years before that National Lampoon cover, it was actually codified by a Marxist Columbia University professor and his research assistant in an article in The Nation May 2, 1966. The professor of social work was Richard A. Cloward, and his research assistant was Frances Fox Piven. What they authored became known as "the Cloward-Piven Strategy of Orchestrated Crisis."

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Cloward and Piven specifically calculated their strategy as a way to end poverty by bringing the capitalist system to collapse through a series of escalating demands that could never be met.

One of their principal demands was the establishment of a "guaranteed annual income." Just six years later, this demand became a part of the platform of the 1972 Democratic National Convention and the presidential nominee that year, George McGovern.

But Cloward and Piven didn't just argue that such ideas should become political demands. They argued that action needed to be taken by like-minded fellow travelers to wreak havoc on the system. One way that was to be accomplished, they explained in their treatise, was for social workers to sign up the poor in existing social programs at such levels as to tax the system to the breaking point.

When these entitlements were no longer able to be covered by government agencies, the new dependent class would riot and rebel and create chaos that would create a real crisis for the system.

An example of the way this Cloward-Piven strategy worked quickly followed when it was actually implemented by George Wiley, the founder of the National Welfare Reform Organization. In the early 1970s, Wiley's NWRO hired "social workers" with the express purpose of expanding the welfare rolls as fast as possible. The strategy was so effective that welfare recipients went from 4.3 million nationally to 10.8 million by the middle of the decade. In New York City, there was soon one welfare recipient for every two residents working in the city's private sector.

James Simpson, a former White House staff economist and budget analyst, says "the vast expansion of welfare in New York City that came from NWRO's Cloward-Piven strategy sent the city into bankruptcy in 1975."

Remember the famous New York Daily News headline? "Ford to N.Y.: Drop Dead." President Gerald Ford was between a rock and a hard place because of the Cloward-Piven strategy and the organizational activities of George Wiley.

But that was hardly the greatest claim for Cloward and Piven.

While George Wiley was a disciple of Cloward and Piven, William Radke was a disciple of Wiley. In 1970, after working for NWRO, he formed a new organization – the Arkansas Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN. The name was later changed to Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, but the acronym remained.

This was the organization Barack Obama would serve as an attorney and as a trainer of its leadership.

ACORN wasn't just about registering Democratic voters. It was about registering so many that it created a crisis in the system – the same way Wiley created a crisis in the welfare rolls. Fraudulent voters were just as good as legitimate voters.

Where did the money come from for such abuses? ACORN was heavily funded by George Soros' Open Society Institute.

Did it work?

You bet. The idea behind ACORN's voter registration campaign, which continues to this day, even benefiting now from direct federal taxpayer support, was to register as many Democratic voters as possible, legal or not, and assist them in voting – the more times the merrier. The system had to be overwhelmed with registrations, multiple entries, dead voters, random names, contrived names. When it all became impossible to police, the lobbying for minimal identification standards for voters would begin.

Just 17 years ago, Obama headed the Chicago operations of Project Vote!, an ACORN affiliate. Obama boasts in his autobiography about how successful he was at registering voters on Chicago's South Side.

He was so successful, he was elected president in 2008.

Today, Obama is still employing the Cloward-Piven strategy, but not as a community organizer. Today he is the Community Organizer in Chief.

He's still creating crises as a means of empowerment.

Think about it: With Obama, everything is a crisis – carbon dioxide levels, the banking industry, the automobile industry, the health care system and especially the economy.

He's going to fix them all, he promises.

How?

By turning make-believe crises into real crises.

The goal remains the same as when it was first outlined in 1966 – when little Barack Obama was only 5 years old. It is, as the Marxists of the 1960s and early 1970s explained, to "heighten the contradictions of capitalism," bring the system to its knees and, ultimately, collapse.

Do I exaggerate?

I don't think so.

It's the only paradigm that makes sense given the policies of the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress. They are following a deliberate course to destroy the American free enterprise system, your freedom and the American way of life.

They're pointing guns to the heads of every single American – and, this time, it's no joke.