November 22, 2011 07:03 PM UTC

Hickenlooper Goes "Cloward-Piven!"

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• by: Colorado Pols

As the Pueblo Chieftain’s Patrick Malone reports:

Gov. John Hickenlooper and human services officials on Monday announced a simplified application process for safety net programs aimed at enrolling more Coloradans who qualify for them.

“To be able to more easily get people into the services they need rather than doing a whole bunch of red tape and paperwork means they have more time to train themselves, more time to go out and find a job and get back to work,” Hickenlooper said…

It is already available on the Internet in all 64 counties and screens applicants for eligibility to receive a gamut of local, state and federal assistance  programs  whenever they apply for any individual service…[t]he potential exists to double the number of people enrolled in food assistance programs, according to DHS. More than 184,000 people were eligible for Medicaid but were not enrolled as of 2009, when the Colorado Health Institute last assessed enrollment and eligibility. That report showed that one in five Coloradans eligible for Medicaid were not enrolled.

For those of you who didn’t catch our reference in the title, the so-called “Cloward-Piven” theory is a favorite topic of right-wing television and radio commentator Glenn Beck. Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven were 60s-era lefty college professors who believed, not incorrectly, that a large number of Americans eligible for public assistance were not applying for it–thus concealing the extent of real poverty. In 1965 they wrote a paper asserting that if this gap were closed, it would lead to a systemic crisis and major reforms. We don’t know anyone in government who actually uses this obscure theorizing as a basis for making policy, and the truth is, we had never even heard of Cloward or Piven until Glenn Beck made them famous.

Their methods worked … for a while. From 1965 through 1974, due to the strategy and efforts of Cloward and Piven and their followers, the total recipients on welfare rocketed from 4.3 million to 10.8 million.

It’s important to understand this background before you read the response from state Sen. Kevin Lundberg–the chances that Lundberg is unfamiliar with the “Cloward-Piven Strategy” as described by Glenn Beck in menacing tones are approximately zero.

Sen. Kevin Lundberg, R-Berthoud, said the new approach to qualifying applicants for benefits could leave the already cash-strapped state in an even deeper financial lurch.

“Why are we begging people to come on to the entitlement programs?” he said. [Pols emphasis] “If there’s a legitimate entitlement program out there, it should be available across the board to every citizen in the state of Colorado that qualifies, but I do wonder why we work so hard to make sure that everybody gets all they can from the government. It seems counterproductive to our desire to try to keep costs under control.”

The implied suggestion here that the state should not make public assistance programs easy to access–note we’re not talking about easier eligibility, just easier access–is kind of ugly, and worthy of contempt all by itself. But the real problem could be that Lundberg has stumbled on to Hickenlooper’s secret plan to flood the public assistance rolls with poor people, overwhelm the system, and plunge the state of Colorado into socialist revolution!

If you think our linking Lundberg to Beck’s “Cloward-Piven Strategy” ravings is unfair, we’d ask you to examine Lundberg’s lengthy raving record. Or why Beck’s employee David Harsanyi is still featured in the Denver Post. Thanks to Glenn Beck, this is what millions of people immediately think, the moment somebody like Gov. Hickenlooper announces any such plan to streamline access to public assistance. If anything, “pro-business” Hickenlooper doing this throws these ravings into even sharper relief–as if Lundberg as the point man wasn’t enough.

How’s this? If Sen. Lundberg disavows Glenn Beck’s conspiracy theory as a reason to oppose Hickenlooper’s plan to simplify access to public assistance programs, we’ll apologize.

We don’t expect to apologize.