In my “Cloward-Piven strategy” vs. “unreconstructed bumbling incompetence and narcissism” office pool, the momentum keeps sliding ever more leftward…
****
update: Geoff B sent me an email earlier noting that, per Stanley Kurtz in his new book, Radical-in-Chief, Obama attended the 1983 Socialist Scholars Conference at Coopers Union in NYC put on by the DSA (Democratic Socialists of America). At a forum of the conference called “Social Movements” (which had as its star speakers Frances Fox Piven and Barbara Ehrenreich), the first speaker was Peter Dreier.
About Dreier, Kurtz notes (ppgs 46-47 – emphases courtesy Geoff B):
Still bolder aspects of Dreier’s strategic vision are laid out in his February 1979 Social Policy essay, “The Case for Transitional Reform.” This piece, influential within organizing circles but virtually unknown outside, supplies a Marxist framework and a long-term strategy for community organizing. Here Dreier draws on French Marxist theo rist Andre Gorz’s notion of “transitional reforms,” or “non-reformist reforms,” to suggest a way of transforming American capitalism into socialism. The central idea, borrowed from Gorz, is to create government programs that only seem to be “reforms” of the capitalist system. Rightly understood, these supposed reforms are so incompatible with capitalism that they gradually precipitate the system’s collapse.
Dreier’s strategy has two parts. On the one hand, quasi-socialist in situations need to be pre-established in the heart of capitalist society, so as to turn a coming moment of crisis in a socialist direction. These quasi-socialist institutions, of course, would be groups like ACORN, with a significant semi-governmental role via their insertion into the banking system, public utility commissions, business boards of directors, and so forth. The second part of the strategy involves “injecting unmanageable strains into the capitalist system, strains that precipitate an economic and/or political crisis.”
Dreier has in mind a “revolution of rising entitlements” that “can not be abandoned without undermining the legitimacy of the capitalist class.” “Proximately,” says Dreier, “the process leads to expansion of state activity and budgets, and … to fiscal crisis in the public sector. In the longer run, it may give socialist norms an opportunity for ex tension or at least visibility.” So Dreier’s plan is to gradually expand government spending until the country nears fiscal collapse. At that point, a public accustomed to its entitlements will presumably turn on its capitalist masters when they propose cutbacks to restore fiscal balance. Dreier fears that this intentionally wrought crisis might actually backfire and produce fascism instead of socialism. That is why he believes it’s so important to have a left-wing grassroots movement already in place. Left-wing community organizers will turn the national fiscal crisis in a socialist direction. Dreier seems to think that some revolutionary violence may emerge at this point. Yet his stress is on conditions designed to achieve a gradual transition to socialism.“The Case for Transitional Reform” appeared in 1979, just two years after Harold Washington’s first mayoral campaign began to convince some NAMers that left-insurgent politics within the Democratic Party might be a viable socialist option after all. Dreier’s piece marked a similar turning point in the world of community organizing, part of the process whereby radical socialists began to give up on immediate revolutionary hopes and accept “reformist” strategies instead. In the late seventies, and especially in the Reagan-dominated eighties, radi cal socialists began to turn in force to both electoral politics and community organizing. Dreier caught the spirit of the times by crafting a strategy combining gradualist tactics with a broader Marxist vision for radical social change.
Any of this sounding, you know, familiar…?
My money’s always been on Cloward-Piven, all the way. If only it were bumbling incompetence, instead of the fulfillment of Kruschev’s UN pronouncement:
http://www.infowars.com/you-americans-are-so-gullible/
Obama: helping old commies see their cold-war dreams to fruition since 2008.
Frank Marshall Davis would be proud indeed…
forward to an imminent… revolution, where the working class would overthrow the ruling class
Ironic, huh, that The One is now in position of ruler and he’s attacking or dismissing the working class (anyone that gets a paycheck in the private sector) that don’t want one bit of his “policies”.
Geez, you people just don’t appreciate Obama’s genius. Just ask Mr. Krauthammer..
I’d like to comment, but the cited article just restates my publicly held position dating from the day I was blessedly able to close “The Audacity of Hope” for good.
Read the books they write, and believe what they say. Or what their ghost writers say, at least.
That Hitler fellow would certainly have been nipped in the bud if there had been at least two testicles to be found among all the elites who read “Mein Kampf”.
It’s not an administration, it’s an attack. Obama is not the author, he’s just an instrument.
Racists. Denounced and condemned.
Well, I was told all my talk of Obama being a socialist whose goal would be to reshape America into a soft-socialist / liberal fascist state, was unhelpful, and I was ushered from polite rightwing society. I was told that I was misreading his designs, and that when he said “transform,” that was merely rhetorical flourish.
Now that it’s hip to call him a socialist again, that’s what all the folks who booted me from their blogrolls or organizations and cursed my name are doing — and they aren’t the worse for wear from having given Obama and his administration the cover of comity and the label of “moderate”.
They just chug right along, the primary voices of the right.
Hurray!
who’s owns the blackbarry
Can anyone think of an institution more incompatible with capitalism than one that was a private corporation, generating profits for stock holders, huge bonuses and awards for employees, held the bulk of home mortgages, sliced, diced, and repacked those mortgages into salable securities, and was big enough to threaten the biggest banks and hedge funds, yet was completely protected from the market forces of capitalism?
I refer, of course, to Fannie and Freddie, et al. Word is they’re going to need a few hundred bil. For now.
Might it be part of the Cloward-Piven game plan to pour every single cent down the Fannie-Freddie vortex?
Cloward-Piven, being the get of moonbats, neglects to factor in minor externals like the existence of a China populated with three hundred million excess males under the age of thirty and possessed of a manufacturing capacity that makes 1945 America look like a Vietnamese tire tread sandal making operation.
You create a vacuum by killing the cornerstone of Western civilization, something is going to fill it.
Fuckers.
I hadn’t thought of Fannie-Freddie but you’re right. What came to mind for me as a “non-reformist reform” was Obamacare.
Not “fuckers,” TmjUtah. That’s unhelpful.
These are good men who just happen to hold different beliefs. Like, for instance, you believe in free enterprise and unalienable rights, while they believe you should be their bitch.
Let’s not make this personal. They’ll laugh at us. And that’s the worst thing in the whole wide world!
VOTE CASTLE!
one that was a private corporation
As advertised by the government apparatchiks that held Fred/Fan’s strings.
JeffG,
FWIW I’ve always been with you on the threat the Obamites are to the American way, and many here among the commenariat have been too. Now, none of us were “big” enough to be considered a “threat” to the comity and goodwill that most on the right at least wanted to appear to be giving the first black US President. Unfortunately you’ve had to suffer for being prescient.
Yes, they were moral cowards to fear the race card so much, and the weight that most toxic of charges might have carried with all of the independant/low-information/previously-uninvolved voters who the MFM conned into voting him into power, that they would be as intolerant of any opinion that didn’t appear on it’s face to be at least willing to hear Obama out. But I don’t know any effective way to rub their noses in it. Indeed, I truly think that many of the same folks who ostracized you would still say that they were doing the right thing giving Obama the benefit of the doubt, in that Kurtz research had not been compeleted, hindisght being 20-20, and all of the usual excuses and cliches.
We know all of the facts; that guys like you and Kurtz were talking about Obama’s socialist “tendencies” even before the election. Unfortunately, Kurtz is now embraced for bringing the truth to light.
Maybe you need to collect all the expository posts you wrote leading up to, and just after, the election into a kind of diary-like book and mail it to some prominent voices; talk above the heads of thise who shunned you. In fact, detail the shunning in the introduction; kind of a velvet-gloved, backhand, “I told you so!”, kind of thing. And give the whole collection one of your typical pithy titles.
Just my two cents.
Been knocking on some doors this morning and I gotta tell you, a significant number of people take this view on things. Folks are pissed.
I agree, Fannie and Freddie are sledge hammers. Obamacare, the monopolization of student loans, and the nuclear strike of EPA/FCC/IRS/FDA/OSHA et al regulations about to land on society are simply follow on shots.
I try to explain to folks that nothing has changed since 2008 and they just look at me like I’m nuts.
All the McMansions, Union pensions, granite counter tops, hundred million dollar NBA contracts and seven figure broker bonuses… all have been bought in the last twenty years or so using the paper value of farcical loans magically transmuted into investments – that would supposedly mature someday and mature as wildly profitable – held by entities supposed to have the full faith and credit of the United States behind them.
It could end no other way, once banks realized that their forced subsidy of bad loans meant that the future would be a race to see how much they could skim off the top while feverishly lobbying to make sure that as much paper as possible passed safely from them to F & F. Where are the men honest enough to testify to this?
You don’t get to be a top tier investment banker by being a fucking moron. That’s what the U.S. senate is for. Dishonesty … now that can be common in both arenas.
I don’t care about me, Bob.
I care that the same people who led many conservatives / classical liberals / libertarians astray in 2008 will have the opportunity to do so again in 2012.
And I care that many of these people operate in a way that is strikingly leftist in spirit.
Tweet that, bitches.
Jeff –
If both houses go Republican, which I believe more likely than not, then the new leadership must be of Tea Party stock.
The narrative is still that “conservative” is still fringe. The reality is that whoever wins big defines what the middle is.
I vote freedom. Freedom to be able to fail or fly on my own hook.
We can restrain tyranny absent bloodshed with this election. Down the road… not so much, I am thinking.
“And I care that many of these people operate in a way that is strikingly leftist in spirit.”
You’re right, and it’s up to each of us to call BS from these people where we see it; reminding folks not only of these “conservative leaders” sellout in 2008, but of those disturbing leftists tactics.
Like intolerance of divergent opinions, for one; something vividly underscored by the Juan Williams/NPR episode.
I still think you should put out an “I told you so, bitches” collection; but, you know, come up with a better title.
I’m on a bunch of Obama’s mailing lists. Every time his little precious red, white, and blue “O” seal shows up in my inbox, I throw up in my mouth a bit.
Indeed. I was making a similar argument with respect to the GOP primaries. Do we want “electability” (which, to the GOP establishment’s way of thinking means putting up “moderate” Republicans), or do we want a candidate who provides stark relief with leftist Dems — and so in a general election battle will necessarily force the leftists to move toward the center during their campaigns?
To me, this seems a no brainer. We need to get the political spectrum adjusted and back to its proper alignment. What “pragmatism” has gotten us is the narrative that those who value the Constitution, sovereignty, and American exceptionalism, are “extremists,” while those who back something like a carbon emissions trade regime and socialized health care are “centrists” and “moderates.”
Good work, GOP establishment!
-Baryy Goldwater, 1964 Republican nomination acceptance speech-
-Barry Goldwater, 1960, The conscience of a conservative–
link
Comment by Jeff G. on 10/23
I’m on just the OFA one and, damned, they’ve been so frequent and veer between hectoring and whining.
The one I got yesterday:
Subject line — Election Day won’t be the same without you
November 2nd is just 11 days away — and across the country, we can feel the energy.
At a record pace, folks are knocking on doors, attending phone banks, and gathering at rallies to move America forward. Last Saturday, we reached out to more than 1 million voters together — and the number of folks supporters reach out to is doubling every week.
And we can see these efforts paying off, with polls tightening in key races in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida and elsewhere.
Our Vote 2010 campaign has been an unprecedented effort for an election like this — but to finish strong, we need a robust operation on Election Day itself. And that means we need committed folks to step up and volunteer that Tuesday — taking off work if necessary.
Think about it — you can spend the day making sure that as many voters as possible turn out in key races across the country. We’ll need folks making calls and going door to door, reminding their friends and neighbors to go to the polls.
These contacts will make sure that we win.
Each and every phone call or door knock is a voter that otherwise might not have made it to the polls.
But we need to know that we’ll have enough folks out there on November 2nd to get the votes we need to be successful.
Sign up to volunteer on Election Day:
http://my.barackobama.com/EDayVolunteers
Thanks,
Jeremy
And in a little over a week, that revolution will happen.
We can restrain tyranny absent bloodshed with this election. Down the road… not so much, I am thinking.
I can’t see it either. With the FASB rule expiring in a week and the upcoming $500billion taxpayer union bail out in the lame duck, it’s gonna get real fuckin ugly. And rightly so.
Jeff, it’d be great to see you do a series on Kurtz’s book the same way you did with Jonah’s Liberal Fascism.
Just saying.
In the interim, somebody wake me up when it’s time to start shooting.
They’re gonna try and steal this thing, anywhere they can any way they can. I feel this way because I’m in Illinois. Where every democrat is gauranteed a fair election.
That’s the idea, LMYBD.
I get the book on the 26th. I’ll start the new provocateurism series soon after.
Levin did a story last night on illegal immigrants canvassing for Patty Murray in Seattle.
Illegal Aliens Canvas for Democrats in Washington State
Many of us kept insisting that the big O was nothing but a red diaper baby, we were right. Hopefully (need lots of Hope) the rest of America is waking up to that fact.
Stunner. SEIU Offshoot ‘Mi Familia Vota’ Caught With 6,000 Bogus Colorado Voter Registrations
Amazing isn’t it. A leftist organization is caught attempting to commit massive voter fraud and it’s no big news.
But some politician in Texas mentions in passing that our nation’s birth was predicated on the right of the people to use force in opposion to tyranny, and that this right remains and always will remain the last resort of a free people, and this is all over the news as the end of the Republic.
Oh, hey, check this little fraud out in Houston. I’m thinking road trip, myself. I already sent True The Vote some cash.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/they-hate-our-guts_511739.html
[…] that category, and that is where the “gradual revolution” idea comes from. Goldstein quotes Peter Dreier: …create government programs that only seem to be “reforms” of the capitalist system. […]
I get the book on the 26th. I’ll start the new provocateurism series soon after.
Just in time for Christmas.
And here I thought I was just gonna get Obama’s lump ‘a coal.
Get on it.
Hard.
Oh, and Thomas D, that- good in my book- potential Congress critter was just subtly reminding Washington and it’s ilk that The Texas Constitution, as “mostly” honored by the Federal Government since 1845, allows us to cut bait and stand on our own if & when we choose.
End of The Republic my ass.
Come and Take It.
In the words of Davy Crockett to the same type of Congress: “You can all go to Hell. I’m going to Texas.”
Lamont, I’m for it, except I want to give ’em back the $10 million and recover the lands :-)
It occurs to me that one of the arguments against is bogus. The Treasury is happy to send Social Security checks to Mexico, the Philippines, et. al.; why not to Texas? (In my mind, I would prefer that we dispense with characterizations — not “The Republic of Texas” or anything like that, just “Texas” without qualifiers, FYVM.
Regards,
Ric
We’ve gotten to the point where I have to queue up the Bezmenov videos for uplift.
The Treasury is happy to send Social Security checks to Mexico, the Philippines, et. al why not to Texas?
They can keep it Ric.
We’re all good.
And we’re too busy for the bullshit.
Y’all come on down.
Hope I don’t get yelled at for linking to Patterico (are we still mad about all that, or are we done? I see JD and others over there some so…)
Heh. The qualifiers would be redundant.
Lamont, I’m already here.
In fact, if I read correctly some of the hints you’re dropped, I’m not all that far from you.
Regards,
Ric
Indeed. In the words of William Blakley, “Texas is neither southern nor western. Texas is Texas.”
Ric, I think I knew that. I’d bet we’ve sipped scotch and carved on a steak at a few of the same places. The “y’all” was in general (but mostly referring to our friends around here out in Cali).
You folks better haul ass and get here while our borders are still open.
Stephen Diamond, on Stanley Kurtz’s book:
I haven’t read Kurtz book yet, but this claim that Kurtz thinks Obama-like socialism is “no different than stalinism” strikes me as odd, given that I’ve heard Kurtz. while discussing his findings, say that he sees such socialism as quite akin to the Swedish left’s socialism, which I take to be a far cry from Stalinism. Too, I doubt that Kurtz is confused on questions of democracy, the left and democracy’s worthiness in relation to a leftist’s understanding of it.
Diamond posted this review on Amazon. It was wrong there, too.
I wonder if the defense of Obama from the hard left saying that, “He’s not one of us!” isn’t just as useful to us. They’re not really defending him, they’re defending themselves. They’re saying he’s practically one of us.
AJB is already parroting it as a talking point.
Frankly, I’d like them to buy billboards with this false message.
From page #54 about Manning Marable in 1983 the vice chair of the DSA
Now I have to go the sleep for church is early.
Rightfully, they all deserve a great deal of blame. From the professional left, to their politicians, to their voters.
But, if the professional left and the voters want to decide that it’s only their politicians who are to blame? Good. I think they should consider punishing them for being so insufficiently radical. This cycle would be great but ’12 would be cool as well.
They’re not really defending him, they’re defending themselves.
Because there can’t be a problem with the ideology. It’s perfect. Utopian even.
We’re just stupid hicks what don’t know their ivory tower paradise from fucking our cousins and shootin’ guns.
Plus, there’s that sky God and liberty stuff we keep going on about.
No. The ideology is pure and true, and above reproach by the “educated man”. Only the messenger can be at fault. Even if he is the promised messiah.
Just seems poor Obama is not the one they’ve been waiting for after all. Shame, that.
I wonder if their still storing those Greek columns somewhere. On a Hollywood studio back lot or something.
You know, for their next savior. ‘Cause next time the left will get it right (no pun intended).
Pinky swear.
That’s right, LYBD. They show no signs of diagnosing their real problems. I applaud their determination on this matter. It’s just so much easier to fight a blind man.
I applaud their determination on this matter. It’s just so much easier to fight a blind man
Well said. But we shouldn’t applaud psychosis bh. Makes us enablers. And in a base of blind men, the one eyed leftist politician is king.
See: Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid
Thank you Lord for allowing the rest of us to see.
Dreier fears that this intentionally wrought crisis might actually backfire and produce fascism instead of socialism.
Or perhaps the victims of the crisis might simply elect to hang those who intentionally wrought it? Wha’…yes, I know: I’m fired.
We are a republic and not a democracy.
Dreier fears that this intentionally wrought crisis might actually backfire and produce fascism instead of socialism.
Heh.
Mean while, in Hell.
Hitler’s ears are burning.
We are a republic and not a democracy.
Heard on the street outside after a rather important Continental Congress meeting in Philly, circa 1787:
Woman: “So what kind of government have you given us?”
Ben Franklin: “A Republic…if you can keep it.”
Some further explanation of #48.
A Democracy or a Republic are thought of often as things that are synonymous with individual freedom, liberty, they are not necessarily. They are means to be steered toward desired ends. Processes which which output a product. That product can be individual freedom or socialism.
Our Constitutional Representative Republic (I know that “representative” is redundant) has, with it’s Declaration of Independence as a statement of the desired end, and the Bill of Rights as a steering mechanism toward that end, been amazingly resistant to being turned toward a different end. Much more so than the many Parliamentary Representative Democracies we see around the world.
The Democratic Socialists of America was formed to work within the Democratic Party to transform the end that the Constitution was steered towards, from individual freedom with individual rights endowed by our creator and protected from government intrusion, to a vision of a socialist system where the government grants rights to groups as it wills and only as long as it wills.
This is why Manning Marable states quite clearly
. It is also why Obama can’t seem to say the words “endowed by our creator” and speaks of “positive rights” granted by government to groups not of individual rights “endowed by our creator”.
If they can manage to change how language works so that when anyone reads the Declaration of Independence or the Bill of Rights and see them steering government towards socialism then the job of transformation will be a greased slope right down to the socialist hell they envision as heaven.
These are good men who just happen to hold different beliefs. Like, for instance, you believe in free enterprise and unalienable rights, while they believe you should be their bitch.
HA. Jeff, could you put that in your rotating quotes? That’s a keeper.
Dreier fears that this intentionally wrought crisis might actually backfire and produce fascism instead of socialism.
What’s the difference?
Jeffersonian, my parents told me the only difference between communism, socialism and fascism are the means of implementation.
I linked you back to my place. I know that it’s 2010… but if I learn how to trackback, time will end.
Obama got it slightly wrong. But just the same the citizenry of the USA is about to place a permanent restraining order on El Presidente Nov. 2.
I knew what the campaigner-in-chief was up to the first time I heard him live in 200z. His anti-bullying talk this weekend about feeling “out of place” and moralizing about treating everyone with respect made me almost puke. He’s nothing but a bully, beating up on the heartbeat of this country and the good and ordinary people who make it exceptional.
That said, a grammar reminder: “it’s” is a contraction of “it is.” “Its” is possessive (no apostrophe). To get it right, just insert “it is” and see if it works.
That would be 2007.
Hmmpff! I called Obama “a fucking Chicago politician” in the first weeks of 2008 and stated that was reason enough to oppose him, but I knew back in October of 2007 that the fix was in for Obama when a NYT sportswriter of my acquaintance was gassing on about Obama.
There’s usually no penalty for being behind the curve, but if one is too far ahead of it they will be seen as a bit too obscure or paranoid for the lemmings to heed.
How is that not fascism?
Sorry, English is my third language but I have no first or second as my various English teachers would attest if any are still alive and competent.