Tag: communism

Cloward-Piven Strategy: How Mamdani and Other Socialists Could Overload the Welfare System Until the Country Collapses

During her failed bid for the U.S. presidency, Kamala Harris made free-market economists and freedom-loving Americans cringe when she said, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” This fundamental Marxist slogan openly signals that if Kamala or her socialist-leaning allies were elected, those who work harder or earn more would be forced to subsidize those who refuse to work, or people who spend their days protesting, or make unsustainable life choices.

Kamala is gone, but Zohran Mamdani and several others in government are taking up the socialist banner. Among the self-proclaimed democratic socialists currently in Congress are Bernie Sanders, who serves in the U.S. Senate; Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a former DSA; Summer Lee, a DSA member serving in the House; and Greg Casar, also a DSA member in the House.

Some recent changes in the landscape include Jamaal Bowman losing his Democratic primary in June 2024, and Cori Bush losing hers in August 2024. Rashida Tlaib continues to serve, though her DSA membership status is currently unclear. Meanwhile, New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani openly pushes socialist policies, with what appears to be the intent of destroying New York City through economic collapse, following a strategy reminiscent of Cloward-Piven.

Policies like state-owned grocery stores, government seizure of rental properties, rent control, universal basic income, debt forgiveness, and arbitrary wealth taxes are classic tools of socialism that ultimately break the economy. These and similar proposals have been pushed by various DSA politicians, including Mamdani.

All of these tools are part of the Cloward-Piven strategy, a Marxist framework designed to trigger economic collapse and usher in radical political change and authoritarian control. The concept originated in the 1960s with sociologists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, who advocated for expanding the welfare state by lowering eligibility criteria to enroll more people. They believed that overwhelming the system would force a crisis, ultimately leading to reforms like guaranteed income and a universal social safety net.

This idea of dismantling the current system, rather than encouraging individuals to thrive within a free-market society, is rooted in Marxism, which centers on the conflict between the working class (proletariat) and the owning class (bourgeoisie). Marx believed capitalism would inevitably exploit workers to such a degree that they would revolt, overthrow the ruling class, and establish a classless society.

While Marxists claim their goal is to improve life for citizens, the real outcome of the Cloward-Piven strategy is to flood entitlement programs, welfare, unemployment, and more, until the system becomes financially unsustainable. The resulting collapse would spark widespread chaos, including violence and unrest, creating an opportunity for radical leftists to seize power and impose authoritarian rule under the pretext of “martial law.”

Open border policies can be used to accelerate systemic collapse by overwhelming public services. The system is further strained by the influx of illegal immigrants and asylum seekers who receive government-funded benefits without paying income taxes. At the same time, the creation of a large illegal workforce drives down wages and reduces job opportunities for Americans, pushing more citizens onto welfare rolls and increasing the burden on public assistance programs.

Socialism, supported by propaganda, often gains ground by identifying real problems and offering government solutions. For example, high rents are a genuine concern for many, making proposals like rent control or government-owned housing appear attractive. However, imposing rent control reduces the supply of available apartments while increasing demand, worsening the housing shortage.

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“There’s No Nothing”: Empty Shelves, Rotten Odors Plague Gov’t-Funded Supermarket In Missouri

One of the dozen or so socialist policy proposals from NYC Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani is the creation of government-funded grocery stores.

While the Democratic Party increasingly embraces socialist and Marxist-leaning policies, such as the seizure of private property, this idea of government-funded grocery stores appears disconnected from both fundamental economic realities and historical precedent.

Nowhere is this more evident than in East Kansas City, where a nonprofit operates a grocery store on government land that has become a symbol of failure, plagued by the smell of rot and empty shelves.

Local media outlet KSHB 41 Kansas City toured Sun Fresh Market at 3110 Wabash Ave (31st & Prospect) on the city’s Eastside. The store opened in 2018 as part of a multi-million dollar public-private revitalization of the Linwood Shopping Center. Operated by Community Builders of Kansas City, a nonprofit focused on urban development, the store has since become a massive reminder that while socialism may sound great on paper, in practice, it can be an absolute disaster. 

KSHB 41’s Alyssa Jackson reported that her news team received a tip from a viewer about empty shelves throughout the dairy section, meat department, bakery aisle, and deli counter.

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America’s Armchair Revolutionaries: How The Left Is Rediscovering Marxism As The Ultimate Virtue Signal

During the Cold War, Soviet communists reportedly referred to American liberals as “useful idiots.”

Although the origin of the quote has been challenged (and attributed to both Lenin and Stalin), it captured many of the adherents of communism after World War II. From higher education to Hollywood, dilettantes on the left embraced Marxism with little real understanding of the philosophy or its implications.

We are now seeing the rise of a new generation of armchair revolutionaries who are calling for everything from the overthrow of the U.S. government to the seizure of factories and homes.

Democratic New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani personifies this new movement of young people lacking any memory of the failure of socialist and communist systems in the 20th Century.

Mamdani is perfect for this rising movement of Latte Leninists and trust-fund baby Trotskyites. The privileged son of a radical Columbia professor and a Hollywood producer, Mamdani went to the elite Bowdoin College, which charges over $70,000 annually in tuition. He is part of the “radical chic” of American higher education, where extreme views are fully mainstream.

Mamdani shows the appeal of mouthing Marxist manifestos as manifest truths. It is Marxism-lite — promises of everything from rent control to making “Halal eight bucks again.”

In one speech before the Young Democratic Socialists of America conference, Mamdani even stated matter-of-factly how one of the goals is to “seize the means of production” in America.

“Right now, if we’re talking about the cancellation of student debt, if we’re talking about Medicare for all, you know, these are issues which have the groundswell of popular support across this country,” he said.

“But then there are also other issues that we firmly believe in, whether it’s [boycott-divestment-sanctions against Israel] or whether it is the end goal of seizing the means of production, where we do not have the same level of support at this very moment.”

Mamdani offers few details of what it would mean to seize all industry in this country or how such a system would work in the United States after failing in literally every nation where it has been attempted.

He has also called for the seizure of unoccupied luxury condos in New York to turn over to the homeless.

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Kansas City poured millions into a grocery store. It still may close.

It was the lone tomato in the produce bin that nearly made Marquita Taylor weep.

She’d stopped in her neighborhood grocery store, the place that was cause for celebration when it opened seven years ago. Area residents had long lived without a decent supermarket on Kansas City’s east side, and KC Sun Fresh was the city’s attempt to alleviate a lack of access to healthy food in its urban center.

But the store, in a city-owned strip mall, is on the verge of closure. Customers say they are increasingly afraid to shop there — even with visible police patrols — because of drug dealing, theft and vagrancy both inside and outside the store and the public library across the street.

KC Sun Fresh lost $885,000 last year and now has only about 4,000 shoppers a week. That’s down from 14,000 a few years ago, according to Emmet Pierson Jr., who leads Community Builders of Kansas City, the nonprofit that leases the site from the city. Despite a recent $750,000 cash infusion from the city, the shelves are almost bare.

“We’re in a dire situation,” Pierson said.

As grocery prices continue to climb and 7 million Americans face losing federal food assistance, more cities and states across the country — in Illinois, Georgia and Wisconsin — are experimenting with the concept of publicly supported grocery stores as a way to help provide for low-income neighborhoods.

Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic candidate for mayor of New York City, has attracted attention for his campaign pledge to combat “out-of-control” prices by establishing five city-owned supermarkets that he says will pass savings onto customers by operating “without a profit motive.”

Yet these experiments, like the one in Kansas City, often don’t account for social issues that can make success even more challenging. Critics say the efforts are unrealistic regardless because grocery stores have such slim profit margins and struggle to compete with the prices offered by big-box chains like Walmart. High-profile projects have failed in recent months in Florida and Massachusetts.

“Running a grocery store is a difficult business,” said Doug Rauch, a former Trader Joe’s president who founded a chain of low-cost stores in the Boston area that shuttered in May. “You can have religion about the mission, but if you don’t have vast experience and knowledge about how to run these operations, you’re really going to be in trouble.”

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Sen. Elizabeth Warren Backs Zohran Mamdani’s Proposal For State-Owned Grocery Stores

Senator Elizabeth Warren has thrown her support behind New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s proposal for government-owned grocery stores.

During an appearance on CNBC Squawk Box on Friday, the Massachusetts Senator was asked about some of Mamdani’s most radical proposals, which include the state owning and subsidizing groceries with its own stores.

She explained:

We’ve got a problem with entire food deserts where people can’t get access to grocery stores.

He said, I’d like to take a look at whether or not we can have some kind of — like we do on military bases — you have some kind of support from the city government that says, we’re going to get some food, grocery stores in areas that, right now, are food deserts.

And by the way, it’s a new and fresh plan for New York City. But it’s been tried in other cities around the country and has had some real successes.

So, what I hear Mamdani say is, I want to try things to make it work for working families. And you know what? This is how democracy works.

A lot of people in New York City said, that sounds good to me, I’d rather try that than any of the other alternatives available to me, I support that.

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Wells Fargo Suspends Travel to China After Communist Regime Blocks Top Banker from Leaving

Wells Fargo suspended travel for all of its employees to China on Thursday after the Chinese government slapped an exit ban on banker Chenyue Mao.

Mao is an American citizen who was born in Shanghai. She is a managing director for Wells Fargo, working from an office in Atlanta. According to the bank, her duties include helping international companies manage their working capital in different countries.

Mao specializes in “factoring,” the practice of selling accounts receivable to third parties. The seller gets cash immediately, while the buyer or “factor” proceeds to collect on the invoices they purchased at a discount. Companies that do business overseas often find factoring preferable to running debt collections operations in foreign countries.

In June, Mao was elected as chairwoman of FCI, a global industry organization for international accounts receivable. FCI was called Factors Chain International when it was established in 1968, and factoring remains one of its primary interests, but it has diversified into other aspects of finance and debt collection across national borders.

When it announced Mao’s election as chair of its executive committee, FCI noted she had over 21 years of experience with factoring and has worked at Wells Fargo for over a decade. During that time, she was credited with growing “annual import-factoring flows to 2.6 billion euros (over $3 billion in U.S. dollars) while fostering innovation in open-account solutions.”

FCI said her goals as chairwoman included recruiting more banks to the organization and “expanding import-factoring know-how within the network.”

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The Democratic Candidate for Mayor of NYC Zohran Mamdani, on prisons and jails

Zohran Mamdani, Democratic Candidate for NYC Mayor, Questions the Purpose of Prisons: The Progressive Experiment Endangering Public Safety

In yet another example of how far the modern left has gone, Zohran Mamdani, Democratic candidate for Mayor of New York City, publicly questioned the very existence of the prison system. At a recent event —which felt more like a college book club than a serious policy proposal— Mamdani not only revealed his lack of grasp on the issue but also implicitly mocked crime victims with a flippant, condescending tone. “What are prisons for, really?” he asked out loud, while name-dropping authors and book titles that supposedly support his abolitionist stance. Still, he admitted he hasn’t actually read some of those books.

These kinds of statements are not harmless. They reflect the dangerous trend among some Democrats to prioritize ideology over reality. New York is already reeling from “reform” policies that have weakened the justice system, enabled the early release of repeat offenders, and downplayed the need to protect law-abiding citizens. Mamdani’s rhetoric doesn’t just advocate closing prisons; it seeks to delegitimize the very concept of punitive justice—based on emotional and intellectual narratives that ignore the communities most affected by violence.

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Democratic Socialism Is Totalitarianism

After writing about the upset election win of socialist Zohran Mamdani in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary, a reader sent me an angry email, telling me that Mamdani was a “democratic socialist,” and that Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez were “social democrats.” The sender apparently wanted me to believe that all they wanted was to make New York and the United States into Denmark.

After all, isn’t Denmark one of the world’s happiest countries? Doesn’t it have a $22 minimum wage? (Actually, it has no federal minimum wage). Doesn’t it have wonderful welfare benefits along with lots of personal freedom? So, if we can just elect the kind of politicians that want to turn the US into Denmark, then we should do it.

There are some issues, of course.

For one, Denmark is far from a socialist country and it certainly does not have a socialist planned economy. This is an important point, because AOC, Sanders, and Mamdani all have called for substantial government planning and ownership and Mamdani has gone even further. The socialist online magazine Jacobin recently praised Mamdani precisely because he does call for the full socialist economy:

No one should be surprised that Zohran Mamdani supports democratic control over the economy, the end goal of socialism. But he won because he combined socialist politics with practical solutions to the cost-of-living crisis facing working people.

At a 2021 conference of the Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA), Zohran Mamdani discussed various short-term reforms favored by the organization. But alongside offering his thoughts on the groups’ immediate aims, he also had something to say about “end goal” of socialist politics: “seizing the means of production.”

In the last week, the clip resurfaced on right-wing social media, where it’s been treated as a damning discovery about Mamdani, who just won a primary to become the Democratic nominee for mayor in New York City.

National Review ran a brief item on the clip under the headline “Uh, That’s Literal Communism!” On CNN, Scott Jennings concurred, saying that Mamdani was “using the language of the Bolsheviks.” Congresswoman Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY) said that this was “the scariest thing Mamdani has said” and that it was “straight out of Karl Marx’s Communist playbook.”

It’s unclear why these remarks about the end goal of socialist politics are supposed to be shocking.

There is much to process in this short passage, and it speaks volumes about so-called democratic socialists. For that matter, that socialists would want to identify with the Jacobins speaks volumes to their intentions, given that the Jacobins were the first political party to organize and carry out political terror complete with mass executions during the French Revolution. Second, by claiming that “democratic control over the economy” means the state “seizing the means of production,” they speak to the totalitarian and violent nature of their “democratic” beliefs. One does not “seize” anything without coercion. As Jacobin editor Bhaskar Sunkara bragged in a recent interview, “We were not trying to hide Marxism.”

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Watch Mamdani the Commie Say That He’s OK With the ‘Abolition of Private Property’

People on the left keep insisting that New York City Democrat nominee for mayor, Zohran Mamdani is not a communist, yet clip after clip of this guy talking reveals him to be an outspoken Marxist through and through.

This time, it’s a clip of him on some podcast saying that he is fine with the abolition of private property.

Note how he frames it. He wraps these comments in claims that he just cares so much about making sure that everyone has housing that he is open to doing away with private property. See? It’s just because he cares so much that he might have to take homes away from some people in order to make sure that other people have homes. It’s all about caring.

FOX News reports:

Zohran Mamdani’s past comments are once again coming back to haunt his New York City mayoral campaign, as a resurfaced video reveals the socialist candidate floated the “abolition of private property.”

“My platform is that every single person should have housing, and I think faced with these two options, the system has hundreds of thousands of people unhoused, right? For what?” Mamdani questioned in a resurfaced video that has been clipped and reposted across conservative social media.

“If there was any system that could guarantee each person housing, whether you call it the abolition of private property or you call it, you know, just a statewide housing guarantee, it is preferable to what is going on right now,” Mamdani said.

“People try and play like gotcha games about these kinds of things, and it’s like, look, I care more about whether somebody has a home,” he said.

The clip drew widespread condemnation from conservatives, including GOP Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, who told Fox News Digital, “He claims to be a socialist, whether it’s wanting to abolish private property or wanting to seize the means of production, these are communist ideas right out of the playbook of Karl Marx.”

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China faces draft dilemma as youth reject military conscription

As Beijing prepares for its grand September 3rd military parade, a pageant meant to project might across the Taiwan Strait, troubling cracks are appearing beneath the polished boots and synchronized salutes. A rising wave of defiance among China’s youth is testing not only the mettle of its armed forces but also the ideological grip of the Communist Party itself.

The announcement of the parade, made by the State Council Information Office on June 28th, was meant to remind the world of China’s growing military prowess. But just days later, that carefully curated image was shaken by a bold act of resistance. In early July, Chinese state media reported that a young man from Guilin had been severely punished for refusing compulsory military service after enlisting in March 2025.

A 2004-born college student nearing graduation reportedly struggled to adapt to the military’s rigid conditions and sought to withdraw from service multiple times. Authorities, however, responded with severe penalties—expelling him and imposing restrictions on employment, financial access, and overseas travel. He also faces a hefty fine of over ¥37,000, signalling zero tolerance for voluntary exit.

Recent conscription refusals in China appear far from isolated. A former legislative official now in exile claims over 200 similar cases occurred in Inner Mongolia alone, along with provinces like Shandong, Hubei, and Fujian recording widespread resistance. Analysts link this trend to a deeper disillusionment: a clash between rigid military expectations and a generation nurtured in comfort and digital independence, increasingly skeptical of the state’s legitimacy and unwilling to endure harsh regimentation for questionable nationalist aims.

What deters these young recruits is more than just the iron discipline. Whistleblowers reveal widespread corruption within the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) forged reports, sold positions, and power networks immune to accountability. For idealistic youth once drawn by patriotic fervour, the realization is sobering: they are entering not a dignified profession, but an institution hollowed out by greed and favouritism.

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