How Obama’s minions grant Frances Fox Piven her wish; plus: Chicken Dems found!
Back in December 2010, Ron Radosh alerted us to Frances Fox Piven’s call for Greek-style riots to sweep the US. Piven, of course, is co-creator of the 1966 Cloward-Piven strategy to overwhelm the US welfare system as a means of pushing the nation over the edge into socialism. Piven has since been welcomed into both the Clinton and Obama White Houses, and last year she renewed and updated that 1966 strategy, as quoted in Radosh’s article:
An effective movement of the unemployed will have to look something like the strikes and riots that have spread across Greece in response to the austerity measures forced on the Greek government by the European Union, or like the student protests that recently spread with lightning speed across England in response to the prospect of greatly increased school fees.
That sounds a bit like what we’re seeing in Wisconsin, no? Especially the role she envisions for students, in reaction to “austerity measures.” Well, here’s a little more detail on the mechanics of granting Piven’s wish. The man behind the curtain is the man in the White House.
Organizing for America, Obama’s campaign arm now under the umbrella of the DNC, has been mobilizing union members and supporters to rally against a proposed Wisconsin budget measure that would strip [some unionized public sector] workers of collective bargaining rights and force them to contribute more for benefits [which the taxpayers are currently footing entirely].
Leaders have initiated phone banks and on-the-ground canvassing, and relied on a social media blitz on Facebook and Twitter to build turnout.
DNC Chairman Tim Kaine also reportedly spoke with Wisconsin union leaders and state legislators ahead of the protests, the Huffington Post reported, signaling his direct involvement in coordinating the effort.
I had to fix a little of that for them.
If a single hair on the head of a single Wisconsin GOP legislator or Gov. Walker is harmed, Obama and his troops will own that. They are directly generating this nonsense, and they are responsible for keeping it going. If it gets out of control, they will be responsible for that, too.
Oh, and to answer Matt Welch’s question – No. It’s not.
By the way, Jim Hoft says the Chicken Dems (whom he has dubbed the Flee-Baggers – heh) have turned up in Chicago. Which this blog predicted yesterday, before they turned up at that Scots Hooters in Rockford.
Oh fiddlesticks, Bryan. According to Rick Moran, you’re a conspiracy theorist for talking about Piven. And so is Ron Radosh.
The big problem the recycled anti-America hippies like Pivens have is that this is the 21st century, and Americans are realizing what’s been going on while they were dis-engaged because of a silent media. The internet has changed the game, providing the investigative reporting needed for the average person to see the end of 75 years of vote-buying by politicians. The trough is empty; more demonstrating and rhetoric don’t change the laws of economics.
‘Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.’ John Adams
Tone It Down
Sanford F. Schram
A year ago I tried to organize social scientists around the country to petition their professional associations to complain about how Glenn Beck was intentionally demonizing Frances Fox Piven as someone who with her late-husband, Richard Cloward, allegedly was the inspiration behind President Barack Obama’s secret plan to destroy our economic system so that we would be forced to move to a communist government. Easy I thought: the guy’s a nutjob, lying about a prominent scholar/activist and a popular president. Silly me! I got a lot of push back.
The most common reaction was: “I don’t watch Glenn Beck,” as if I were asking people about their TV viewing habits. I talked about how Beck was dangerously inflaming his gun-toting Tea Party audience and people wanted to tell me that they were above tuning in to his form of political mud wrestling. This kind of response reminded me of the dialogue from the popular film Pulp Fiction when two hit men, played by Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta, driving to an assignment, were discussing how one of them had been recently to Paris and ate a “Le Big Mac” at a McDonald’s there. The other hit man, later trying to indicate he is similarly cultured, talks about an actress who was in a pilot made for television. The snob hit man responded: “I don’t watch TV.” The dismissive comeback: “Yes, but you’re aware that there’s an invention called television, and on that invention they show shows?” End of discussion; commence killing.
My thoughtful academic colleagues are educated people, concerned about public affairs, but when presented with an opportunity to take some action, they balked by first emphasizing they were above it all. Pardon me, but now we are all down and dirty with the mudslinger. When Beck finally crossed the line and pushed enough buttons so that Piven began getting death threats via email and phone calls, well that was different and now all the major academic professional associations issued statements condemning Beck for inciting violence, something he does nightly ever since his show started airing on Fox News two years ago.
Yet, the lesson we seem to be learning is not what I was hoping for. I had hoped that with people speaking up, Beck would step it down, if just a bit. No luck there. This is in good part because Beck is as relentless as he is clueless. He just keeps talking, never stopping to listen for a second. He sputters a lot, but never stops. Night after night, I watch him reiterate his paranoid delusions. With this controversy, he now just uses all the added attention to spew more vicious lies. Never for one second has he stopped to re-think the absolute absurdity that the President is channeling Piven and Cloward’s plan to ruin America.
And what about that plan? Well it turns out that that was a short article in the Nation magazine published in 1966, if you can believe it, which called for poor people who were eligible for welfare, but not receiving it, to sign up and throw the broken welfare system into crisis to the point that the government would finally agree we needed something better like the guaranteed income, which Richard Nixon, of all people, eventually proposed and Congress voted on twice, but narrowly failed to adopt. Saying this was a plan to ruin our society and force communism is as absurd as saying Obama is intentionally enacting a plan to ruin America by trying to get the economy going again. It is all crazy. And it needs to be called exactly that.
Yet, did we get much examination of this delusional thinking? No, instead, when the battle went public, it was already too late for the primary focus of those efforts to call Beck out as a dangerous demagogue polluting public discourse. Instead, by waiting until the death threats emerged, people were left having to deal with the urgency induced by such irresponsible behavior. Lost in the intensity of the moment was any serious attempt to highlight the absurdity of Beck’s rantings. He got a free pass on his outrageous claims while everyone focused (rightly, given the situation, as it had developed) on the dangerousness of his vilifications.
So the debate now turns to whether Beck is a dangerous instigator of violence, which of course he clearly is. Yet, what is left in the dust is that he is also a dangerous polluter of public discourse who persistently, if serenely, goes about twisting people’s statements and facts beyond recognition to serve his purposes. Getting people the welfare they are eligible for is not trying to create communism. Or take Piven and Cloward’s later effort, more successful, to require state government offices, welfare, motor vehicles, etc., to offer to register people to vote. How is encouraging people to exercise their rights to entitlement or their right to vote an intentional plan to diabolically destroy America? Isn’t guaranteeing people their rights what America’s all about? Yes, of course, but not Beck’s America. Beck’s America is the America of the privileged who worry that if the poor get welfare or get to vote that things will change (and not just here, but also around the world: witness Beck’s opposition to the popular uprisings in Egypt that have brought down Hosni Mubarak). At their “beck and call” (Bill O’Reilly’s term for when Beck appears on his show regularly) is the demagogue lying about Piven and Cloward and Barack Obama.
This is where the current situation gets sticky. The professional associations have chosen to emphasize the right to criticize but the need to do it civilly. Regardless of how I sound, I am all for that, both the debate and the civility, but my frustration is that what this emphasis misses is the substance. And the substance is so outrageous, it needs to be talked about in terms that make it plainly clear just how outrageous that substance is. To emphasize the need to debate civilly makes it sound that Beck’s only problem is his tone, which is what is dangerous and incites violence. Yet, let’s face facts, tone is the least of Beck’s problems. Even if he were to tone it down, he would still be broadcasting to over a million people a day malicious lies about Piven and Cloward’s efforts to get poor people their rights and the President’s attempts to turn the economy around. Not focusing on his lies leaves them the credibility they do not deserve. It makes it seem as if Fox News actually delivers news rather than fabrications and distortions of the truth. Let’s focus on that for a while, even as we address the urgency of the moment that death threats bring.
Sanford Schram teaches social theory and social policy at Bryn Mawr College’s Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research. He wrote Praxis for the Poor: Piven and Cloward and the Future of Social Science in Social Welfare (NYU, 2002).
LOL! What do you say about all of the spooky “death threats” Sarah Palin gets from Lefty loonbats? You’re delusional if you think people “breaking the welfare system” was a good idea. Guaranteed income? For what? Sitting on your ass and smoking a bowl while watching Jerry Springer and popping out welfare babies from ten different possible fathers?