"The strategy of forcing political change through orchestrated crisis. The ‘Cloward-Piven Strategy’ seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse."

"Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven were two lifelong members of Democratic Socialists of America who taught sociology at Columbia University (Piven later went on to City University of New York). In a May 1966 Nation magazine article titled ‘The Weight of the Poor,’ they outlined their strategy, proposing to use grassroots radical organizations to push ever more strident demands for public services at all levels of government.

"The result, they predicted, would be ‘a profound financial and political crisis’ that would unleash ‘powerful forces ... For major economic reform at the national level.’ "

"They implemented the strategy by creating a succession of radical organizations, most notable among them the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), with the help of veteran organizer Wade Rathke. Their crowning achievement was the ‘Motor Voter’ act, signed into law by Bill Clinton in 1993 with Cloward and Piven standing behind him.

"As we now know, ACORN was one of the chief drivers of high-risk mortgage lending that eventually led to the financial crisis. But the Motor Voter law was another component of the strategy. It created vast vulnerabilities in our electoral system, which ACORN then exploited. …