COVID-19: The Cloward-Piven Strategy

How a strategy for social change invented by 60's radicals was adapted for the crisis of the 21st century.

Beneath the real and the exaggerated elements of the covid scamdemic I have long sensed an economic agenda, one that is incongruous with the ostensive national goal of emerging from the corona crisis quickly and largely intact. Back in March 2020, when we were still being led to believe the infection fatality rate (IFR) of covid was around 3.5%, the lockdowns made no sense to me. Given the submicroscopic size, “SARS-CoV-2 is an enveloped virus ≈0.1 μm in diameter,” it would be near impossible to avoid on a long enough timeline. If indeed 3.5% of America’s citizens were going to die as a consequence, that would be sad and messy but the other 96.5% would obviously need to keep plugging away at their jobs in order to ensure society’s stability through the tragedy. The lockdown and social distancing never make economic or strategic sense. By April 2020, when serology studies began to come out showing the IFR was far under 1%, a rational and sane nation would have immediately put on the brakes. Instead lockdowns were extended, ‘the mask’ became ubiquitous, and the economic damage became permanent. I knew then the covid countermeasures were simply The Cloward-Piven Strategy gussied up for the 21st century world.

Sociologists Francis Fox Piven and Richard Cloward

It is our purpose to advance a strategy which affords the basis for a convergence of civil rights organizations, militant anti-poverty groups and the poor. If this strategy were implemented, a political crisis would result that could lead to legislation for a guaranteed annual income and thus an end to poverty.

- Fox and Piven, The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty, The Nation, May 2, 1966 (Emphasis Mine)

Their strategy as initially presented was to overload the welfare rolls by packing as many people as possible onto them, bringing about an economic collapse. Cloward and Piven "proposed to create a crisis in the current welfare system – by exploiting the gap between welfare law and practice – that would ultimately bring about its collapse and replace it with a system of guaranteed annual income. They hoped to accomplish this end by informing the poor of their rights to welfare assistance, encouraging them to apply for benefits and, in effect, overloading an already overburdened bureaucracy.”¹

This Problem-Reaction-Solution dialectic was hardly new, though the idea of applying it to the economy itself was a rather novel and controversial approach. It does seem that over the following years this strategy was used and did lead to a rise in the welfare rolls, but not enough to create a real crisis. “Although the strategy helped to boost recipient numbers between 1966 and 1975, the revolution its proponents envisioned never transpired.”² There just weren’t enough recipients to be found, yet, and the American work ethic was still too strong. Getting Cloward-Piven to work would require creating a much larger and permanent recipient class.

PHASE ONE - THE LOCKDOWN & CASH HANDOUTS

By the time the 15 Days to Slow the Spread was announced, unemployment was already spiking; over 10M by the end of March, and topping out just over 25M by mid-May. If only we had put the brakes on by Easter…

Between the supplemental $600 weekly unemployment checks, stimulus checks, indefinite rent deferments, and employer subsidies like the PPP, by summer ‘we were all socialists now.’ Most of these measures appeared to be winding down going into 2021, but by June 2022 the employment-population ratio was still lower than February 2020 by 1.3% (or -4.3M workers.) Additionally, over $4 Trillion was added to the national debt in 2020 alone. As of today, between administrative, legislative, and federal reserve action, $10.8 Trillion has been spent on covid response; an amount equal to the total nation debt accumulated from the founding through 2008.

The jobs that have come back are not necessarily similar to the ones that were lost. Consider the many small businesses that went under during the pandemic; while their former owners may be employed again, possibly following personal bankruptcy, their incomes are doubtlessly much lower. The millions of employees who lost jobs working at small businesses may need two or more jobs (or ‘gig’ work) to equal what they made before, and that’s before accounting for the rampant inflation.

PHASE TWO - VACCINE INJURIES

How many Americans have suffered a vaccine injury? This is a very important question economically, and one that has been largely off limits until very recently. I read a post on Substack earlier today from The Second Smartest Guy in the World which pointed out Twitter is allowing #VaccineInjured to trend.

Why Is #VaccineInjured Being Allowed To Trend On Twitter?

It is possible this means phase two of The Cloward-Piven Strategy has begun, but if not yet then certainly soon. The government has been quite sneaky with their EAU injections; these must be compensated under the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICP), as opposed to the more generous National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP). But still, with enough injuries it becomes a lot of money. No covid claims have been paid yet, but previous successful CICP claims have averaged over $206k each.

The CICP is the payer of last resort and can only reimburse or pay for medical expenses or lost employment income that are not covered by other third-party payers. To date, the CICP has paid compensation for 29 CICP claims, totaling more than $6 million.

- HRSA, Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICP) Data

Ed Dowd has pointed out an increase of 3M disabled Americans, occurring since the start of the mass vaccination campaign, quite possibly due to covid injections. A German Health Insurer reported a vaccine injury rate of 3.6%, before being fired. (This figure is people who required an office visit to deal with the injury, and thus does not include deaths.) The CDC VAERS reporting system is showing just over 848k injury reports in the U.S. as I write this, and those are notoriously under-reported (perhaps by a multiple of 31X).

Depending on which of the above estimates we use, somewhere between 3M and 26M Americans have sustained vaccine injuries or died and are eligible for compensation. If the eventual payouts are made at the average CICP compensation rate of $206k, the total will be between $618B and $5.4T. Talk about overwhelming the system! And, keep in mind this is before the more dubious injury claims that are bound to flow in once the money starts flowing out. I saw this video a few weeks ago, and while I do feel for this woman and her loss, there is something about her tone a few minutes in that makes me a little queasy. No doubt many millions more like her will be insisting to be paid very soon.

When you start adding in all the Americans who are suffering repeat infections due to the shots, the millions who took them against their will to keep their jobs, the millions who are experiencing immune depletion (or VAIDS), the government could easily owe payments to 1/2 of the vaccinated - 130M people - or even all of them. This is Cloward-Piven on the grandest scale ever.

From my standpoint, as a hated refusnik who ‘did his own research’ and only caught covid once, I think the injured do bear some of the blame for their fates, but not all of it. We all know there was no real ‘informed consent’ in this process. Legally, these Americans are owed compensation - probably all 260M of them, and that’s north of $53T. That’s our future like it or not: a complete collapse of our current economic system under the weight of the national debt, entitlements, and payments owed to the vaccine injured. What’s unnerving is the people who are about to be pushing the newly updated fall booster know this too, they know it will make things worse, and continue anyway.

1. Michael Reisch, Janice Andrews, The Road Not Taken, 2001.

2. Robert Weir, Class in America, 2007.