The guard is changing in statehouses across the land as the latest cast of characters takes office. Governor Moonbeam is replacing the Governator in Sacramento; Andrew Cuomo became the 56th governor of New York yesterday. They are two of an increasingly slim number of progressive governors from shrinking states.

Both have got huge problems. In 2006, the Golden State, had it been independent, would have been the eighth largest economy in the world. Now, Gov. Brown is going to have to deal with a budget deficit of more than $20 billion each year for at least the next five.

Gov. Cuomo is promising to immediately take on New York’s huge financial problems while simultaneously fighting to limit taxes on homeowners.

Everywhere in America, there is rising irritation about the high unemployment rate and the entrenched and unsustainable benefits that go to public employee unions, the last bastion of organized labor. The sagging economy has gouged state and municipal budgets, and revealed deep and systemic problems with public pension funds.

The Times this morning- that bell-weather of progressive journalism- reports that “California, New York, Michigan and New Jersey, states where public unions wield much power and the culture historically tends to be pro-labor, even longtime liberal political leaders have demanded concessions — wage freezes, benefit cuts and tougher work rules.”
 
It makes one wonder why the Administration pushed so hard not to address an austere time to come and concentrated all of its energy on reforming the health care system, creating yet another ballooning and unsustainable entitlement bureaucracy.
I do not watch the Fox Network. I mostly reserve television time for sports or movies when I remember to turn it on, but apparently the cable commentators have an answer for what is going on.

The Clowards did it.

I am not making this up. The word itself seems like a combination of Clown and Coward, and according to Glenn Beck and his pals on cable news that is exactly what it means. The term comes from a treatise written for the Nation back in 1966.
The Nation is the oldest magazine still in business and the self-described “Flagship of the Left.“

What has the right so riled up at the moment is the legacy of activists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, who wrote a treatise entitled “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty <http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/03/24-4> ” for the magazine.

I invite you to read it. It is pretty stark and unambiguous about what the two progressive intellectuals were about, which is straightforward: overwhelm the central government with demands for public assistance that would force crisis and hence radical change.

Since the financial crash of 2008 and the election of President Obama, the right has seen the tea party populists attempt to construct a historical narrative to explain what has happened to America.

The general line goes something like this: it was Cloward and Piven’s article that gave ACORN the idea to start peddling subprime mortgages to poor minorities in the 1980s, knowingly laying the groundwork for a global economic meltdown nearly thirty years later. It was Cloward and Piven who had the idea of registering illegal or nonexistent voters through Project Vote and the Motor Voter Act, thus guaranteeing permanent Democratic majorities at the polls.

According to the Right, it is the Cloward-Piven strategy that guides the Obama administration’s every move to this day, as it seeks to ram through healthcare reform, economic stimulus and financial regulation.

As Ms. Piven herself says, it is a little far-fetched to claim that a single article in a low-circulation magazine of opinion some forty-odd years ago. Except that it seems true. Ms Piven was at the signing of the Motor-Voter Act by President Clinton, and always wondered who it was that obnoxious Ted Kennedy thought he was serving.

It certainly wasn’t us poor slobs stuck in between the plutocrats like him and the subsidized poor.

I had dabbled in the intellectual exercise of whether there was something orchestrated about the implementation of policies that were so clearly loony and unsupportable in the long term. I mean, when so much that is truly idiotic is conducted in the guise of public governance, isn’t it possible that there is something else going on?

It first occurred to me back when noted political operative, avowed socialist, former Marine and Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee Ron Dellums refused to sign his own committee’s Defense bill in 1993. It seemed to me that the man in charge of formulating that year’s budget for the uniformed services might not have our best interests at heart. In fact, I wondered if the point of the legislation was to skew the force into one that would not be capable of overseas intervention, or worse, the defense of the homeland.
 
I frankly had a great deal of respect for the courtly manner Chairman Dellums had in committee and on the floor, and made his acquaintance in a chance meeting in a hall at The Bus Station where I worked for The Phone Company after he left congress and was contemplating a run for the mayor’s office back in Oakland, the home of the Black Panther Party.

Ms Piven is something else. You can check for yourself on YouTube- there are dozens of videos in which she advocates the same violent overthrow of the existing order. While Mr. Cloward passed into the ash-heap of history some years ago, she is still at it, and has updated the manifesto. Her involvement with “Motor Voter” is one of the most devastating social action programs passed in our lifetime.

I believe that voting should be what it is- universal suffrage, no obstacles to registration- but that a citizen should have to be proactive in registering, rather than have the nanny state chivy the disinterested into a position where they can be bussed to the polls by energetic activists.

I should have asked Chairman Dellums if he was actually working to implement Cloward-Piven when I had the chance. I am unlikely to be able to ask the President is doing his bit, too.

I hate Communists, and wish I could have rested on my Cold War laurels a little longer. I can see a little of Vlad Lenin in Ms Piven’s intense gaze. They are saying on the radio that this is the year America has to “eat it’s vegetables” and get a little “fiber” in our national diet.

I don’t know if Cloward-Piven is the real template for bringing us down, or just the product of a couple communist dupes who were smart enough to observe what was going on anyway, and seek to give the country a push over the cliff.

We will have to deal with it, starting this year, or we will not be able to do a damn thing about it.

The Class of 1946 became eligible for full social security retirement at midnight last night, so this is going to be a most interesting Congress to watch as they deal with the legacy of a government that, whether the Republicans or Democrats are in charge, appears to have followed the manifesto to a “t.”

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra