Francis Fox Piven in her own words! Crazy Talk and American Politics: or, My Glenn Beck Story

[nashville_brook]

For more than a year, Glenn Beck and his minions of Beckerheads have been targeting 78-year old distinguished professor of political science/sociology, Frances Fox Piven -- accusing her of hatching a plan to overthrow the system. This has resulted in numerous death threats against Piven as Beck has escalated his rhetoric to a holy war status, saying "God will wash this nation in blood," I guess to protect the United States from 78-year old liberals.

Reading this piece by Piven, it's critical to note that the social/political action she and her husband embarked on in the 60s was largely successful -- and THIS is what Glenn Beck is so deeply frightened of: that the poor might actually get some assistance with the help of fierce advocates such as Piven.

I find this tremendously encouraging -- brook





http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/02/14-12

Crazy Talk and American Politics: or, My Glenn Beck Story
by Frances Fox Piven

(snip)

Online posters eagerly identify the connecting threads that depict me as puppet master: I taught at Columbia University when Obama was a student there, and I probably taught him. I spoke at a conference in the 1980s that he probably attended. I was on Obama's transition team. Obama's policies, and especially health-care reform, are obviously a plan to implement my crisis strategy.

None of that is true, of course. So what was this strategy that excites such paranoid imaginings? The article we wrote in 1966 was based on research we had done on the low receipt of welfare benefits by the eligible poor. The research was inspired by our evaluation of the storefront services provided by an early antipoverty program on the Lower East Side of New York City known as Mobilization for Youth.

(snip)

The Nation article, entitled "The Weight of the Poor: a Strategy to End Poverty," called for large-scale campaign by social workers, lawyers, community organizers, and the poor themselves to claim benefits. Such a campaign, we thought, would not only relieve some of the acute poverty in the slums of America; it would also generate rising welfare costs for cities and states at a time of intensifying racial conflict.

(snip)

The article had traction. It was published at a time when civil-rights and economic-rights protests were rising in Northern cities, and it helped inspire a movement of welfare recipients, social workers and lawyers known as the National Welfare Rights Organization. The group was led by a former associate director of CORE, then a major civil-rights organization, and it attracted staff and volunteers who wanted to join in the newly coined effort at "community organization."

(snip -- this section included an interesting discussion of David Horowitz's role in all this crap)



Indeed, they do not seem to read very much. Until early January, when I wrote a short article in The Nation on the need for protests by the unemployed if they are to gain voice and influence in American politics, they paid no attention at all to anything I had written since my 1966 article.

Lunatic though they are, the ravings about our plan for an orchestrated crisis to destroy capitalism—or a Muslim caliphate that will devour Europe—are important because they provide theories of a sort to people who are made anxious by large-scale changes that have overtaken American society. Those include deindustrialization and our loss of pre-eminence in the world, changes in family and sexual norms, and, perhaps most of all, the growing diversity of the American population and the election of an African-American president. Social scientists themselves do not agree about the causes of all these developments, and people without the luxury of time and training are often left angry and confused.

(snip -- rest of story at link)





Frances Fox Piven is professor of political science and sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where she has taught since 1982. She is the author and co-author of numerous books, including The War at Home: The Domestic Costs of Bush's Militarism (2004) and Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America (2006), and has received career and lifetime achievement awards fromt he American Sociological Association and the American Political Science Association. Frances has been featured on Democracy Now!, and regular contributor to The Nation.


For the record:

Specifically, here's what Beck says about Piven:

Let me introduce you to the people who you would say are fundamentally responsible for the unsustainability and possible collapse of our economic system. There are really two people, I’ve been telling you for a while. There they are: Cloward and Piven, Richard Cloward, Frances Fox Piven. They are authors of the Cloward-Piven strategy. Something else to remember is that this isn’t some conspiracy theory that we’re tossing out here. They wrote about collapsing the economy and how they plan to do it in an article they co-authored in the 1960s, "Mobilizing the Poor: How It Could be Done?" six months later published in The Nation under the title "The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty."

Well, what is this strategy, and who’s involved? Well, do you remember on this program over the summer the tree? Watch this. The roots of the tree of radicalism and revolution. It’s Saul Alinsky. It’s Woodrow Wilson. That’s how it’s all made legitimate. It’s progressive. Here are the roots. Here’s SDS. This is for that democratic society. Cloward and Piven come in and say, "Wait a minute. Hang on just a second. What we should do is collapse the system on its own weight." Cloward and Piven. They’re using the same tactics—fear and intimidation—of SDS. Cloward, Piven: overwhelm the system. And look who the President has: Wade Rathke, right up the tree, Dale, right up the tree, Bill Ayers, right up the tree, Jeff Jones, right up the tree!

here's Piven's interview on DemocracyNow --> http://www.democracynow.org/2011/1/14/why_is_glenn_beck_obsessively_targeting

[Name removed]

1. Deleted message

Sub-thread removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[tammywammy]

2. kick n/t