Product Review

Breaking the System examines the origins and political rationale of the strategy of massive government spending and debt creation that has become a hallmark of the Obama administration. Although the financial crisis was not created by the current administration and the massive government intervention (TARP) was proposed by the previous Republican regime to prevent a meltdown, the subsequent explosion of sovereign debt and government programs became part of a strategy utilized by the Obama administration to promote its leftwing game plan. Determined that “no good crisis should go to waste,” the administration has used the economic and social crises afflicting the U.S. to engineer radical changes that would otherwise be politically unacceptable. This is not an ad hoc strategy that Barack Obama and his advisers thought up when they arrived in Washington, but rather the implementation of theory developed forty years ago by two Marxist professors at Columbia University named Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. Their idea to use crisis to break the back of the capitalist, democratic society that has made America great and to substitute massive state control and social engineering for individual freedom and initiative has found a friend in today’s White House.