Cloward-Piven Redux.

To reform something you must destroy it.

Comes word the President’s puppeteers have decided he should decide to again open wide our borders with Mexico. The contrived rationale is somewhat complex (if you wish to slog through it, click here), but it hardly matters; the sole purpose is bringing in thousands or millions of illegals so to bring our already overloaded immigration system to a crashing halt.

The scheme of the Democrats bringing down governmental institutions by overloading them has a long history. It was the brainchild of a husband-wife team of social activists at Columbia University, Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, in 1966. Their idea was to apply their plan to New York City’s welfare system, overloading and bankrupting it so the Federal Government would be forced to bail it out and fund it. Amusingly, Cloward and Piven claimed this would end poverty. The then bizarre notion found a receptive ear in the newly elected Republican(!) mayor of New York, John Vliet Lindsay, who hailed from an old New York family and had both movie star looks and brains. He probably did more damage to the City than any other mayor, before or since, including de Blasio.

Lindsay embraced Cloward-Piven with gusto. The one possible hitch in those days was, if you can believe it, the stigma still attached to being on the dole. He ordered city social workers to go door-to-door in poor neighborhoods and urge every person they encountered to sign onto the welfare rolls, stressing that regardless what they were taught or heard preached, there was no shame anymore receiving other people’s money, for as long they wished.

The campaign was a brilliant success, if you can call it that, and the percentage of souls on relief increased astronomically and remain at those levels to this day. No coincidence was the number of single-family households headed by women also soared; it was no longer necessary to have a man in the house. Along with the attendant woes of rising crime, gangs, dropping out etc., New Yorkers still pay the price of Cloward and Piven’s “reforms.”

Why our putative president and his associates have chosen to apply Cloward-Piven strategy to our immigration system, a seemingly suicidal move in an election year where democrat prospects look disastrous, is certainly puzzling .The only explanation your Tatler can come up with approaches the tinfoil hat category, but, for better or worse, here it is. The idea could be to get these zillions of illegals, using every conceivable manner of cheating the Democrats have so ably mustered over the years, onto the electoral rolls nationwide and have them “vote” democratic. If the scheme actually proves successful, things could get extremely ugly in the United States, but Democrat leaders long ago quit caring about the consequences of their actions, as well the reactions of their opponents.