Heidelberger pulls a Cloward-Piven

Cory Heidelberger tries to attack capitalism with this:

For those of you who insist that government always operates less efficiently than the private sector, here's your counterexample of the week: Indiana officials are considering canceling their contract with IBM to manage its welfare system. What's the problem? IBM is screwing up worse than the state ever did. In January 2007, pre-IBM, the Hoosiers mishandled 4.38% of their food stamps cases. In January 2009, IBM made boo-boos on 18.2% of food stamp cases.

"The horror stories I've heard," said Charles Warren, chairman of the Indiana Institute for Working Families' advisory committee. "Applications rejected for the flimsiest of reasons, lost paperwork, people being told to start all over again" [Will Higgins, "$1B Privatization Deal at Risk," IndyStar.com, 2009.07.08].

Gee, sounds like my experience with my previous private health insurance company.

First off, this is a public/private partnership that is fascist in nature and is not an example of free market capitalism. And then there is this from the link Cory provided:

Murphy says the new system is no worse than the previous state-run system but that the economic recession -- unemployment is 10.6 percent -- combined with last year's extensive flooding has swollen the welfare rolls and bogged down the system. In April, when FSSA last compiled its food-stamp numbers, 695,000 Hoosiers received stamps, compared with 584,000 in April 2007.

Sounds like the good old Progressive trick developed by Cloward Piven:

But for others, the goal is more malevolent - the failure is deliberate. Don't laugh. This method not only has its proponents, it has a name: the Cloward-Piven Strategy. It describes their agenda, tactics, and long-term strategy.

The Strategy was first elucidated in the May 2, 1966 issue of The Nation magazine by a pair of radical socialist Columbia University professors, Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. David Horowitz summarizes it as:

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.

Cloward and Piven were inspired by radical organizer [and Hillary Clinton mentor] Saul Alinsky:

"Make the enemy live up to their (sic) own book of rules," Alinsky wrote in his 1989 book Rules for Radicals. When pressed to honor every word of every law and statute, every Judeo-Christian moral tenet, and every implicit promise of the liberal social contract, human agencies inevitably fall short. The system's failure to "live up" to its rule book can then be used to discredit it altogether, and to replace the capitalist "rule book" with a socialist one. (Courtesy Discover the Networks.org)

Newsmax rounds out the picture:

Their strategy to create political, financial, and social chaos that would result in revolution blended Alinsky concepts with their more aggressive efforts at bringing about a change in U.S. government. To achieve their revolutionary change, Cloward and Piven sought to use a cadre of aggressive organizers assisted by friendly news media to force a re-distribution of the nation's wealth.

In their Nation article, Cloward and Piven were specific about the kind of "crisis" they were trying to create:

By crisis, we mean a publicly visible disruption in some institutional sphere. Crisis can occur spontaneously (e.g., riots) or as the intended result of tactics of demonstration and protest which either generate institutional disruption or bring unrecognized disruption to public attention.

No matter where the strategy is implemented, it shares the following features:

1. The offensive organizes previously unorganized groups eligible for government benefits but not currently receiving all they can.
2. The offensive seeks to identify new beneficiaries and/or create new benefits.
3. The overarching aim is always to impose new stresses on target systems, with the ultimate goal of forcing their collapse.

Capitalizing on the racial unrest of the 1960s, Cloward and Piven saw the welfare system as their first target.

Looks like the leaches have targeted IBM’s fascist agreement with the government welfare system. And after attending the Medicaid Reimbursement legislative meeting in Pierre yesterday, I learned just how complicated the welfare system has become. Sadly, the government health care system doesn’t pay its fair share and the providers are forced to pass costs onto those who have private insurance. And then Heidelberger continues to blame private insurance for unaffordable premiums, a problem created by government intervention.

Comments

[caheidelberger]

Ah, if only I had such godlike power to orchestrate a political crisis... I'd wave that wand and subsidize blogs! ;-)

Now hang on -- I read that same note about the increase in recipients, but can you show me that a 20% increase in recipients logically leads to a quintupling of the number of errors? (I'm taking the error rates times recipients: 584K x 4.38%, then 695K x 18.2%)