Posted on 12/30/2010 10:01:19 PM PST by TenthAmendmentChampion
Writing in The Nation magazine on May 2, 1966, sociologists Richard Cloward and his wife Frances Fox Piven published what was to become in later years one of the most famous and influential of leftist articles. Titled The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty, the two socialist intellectuals developed a new so-called crisis strategy that of trying to use the existing welfare system to create chaos that would weaken the corporate capitalist state and eventually foment revolution. Discover the Networks has a good summary of their thesis...
[snip]
Writing in the current issue, Piven presents a clarion call for a new mass movement, one that the magazine publishes as an editorial statement representing its editors. (It is currently under the magazines firewall.) She begins by noting that nothing is taking place to deal with ending what she claims is an unemployment rate of 15 million people. To regain the 5 percent rate of 2007, she estimates there would have to be 300,000 jobs created each month for several years, something that is next to impossible.
Thus Piven asks a question: So where are the angry crowds, the demonstrations, sit-ins and unruly mobs? In other words, the kind of action her protégé George Wiley fomented in the 70s with the NWRO. She admonishes the Left not to wait for the end of the American empire and even the end of neoliberal capitalism, but to up the ante at present to pressure for big new [government] initiatives in infrastructure and green energy that could ward off the darkness. Her fear is that the new Congress, instead of moving in the direction she and the Left favors, will concentrate on deficit reduction by means of tax cuts and spending cuts. As for President Obama, she sees him as a new version of Herbert Hoover, who foolishly meets with corporate executives and seeks to placate them.
Communism is most assuredly the equality of its people. Under Communism, everybody has nothing.
I've read that between the excesses of Stalin (between 1928 and 1953) and Mao (between 1949 and 1976), the death toll may have reached somewhere between 80 to 100 million dead from forced mass starvation, mass shootings and labor camps--eight to ten times what the Nazis accomplished through mass shootings and the concentration camp system.
I usually cite these facts and most liberals shut up REALLY fast.
My experience with Communism is more personal. My dad was a steward in a union and ran for President. When the votes were counted, there were 10 more votes than members. A subsequent investigation revealed that the Executive Board members were all Communists. The FBI was called in, an eventual trial found the board members guilty and they were deported.
My dad’s reward was a three year blackball and frequent visits from FBI agents over the next 10 years.
they can come and collect it 55 grams at a time...
Real close to PMSNBC's new slogan "Lean forward".
“These two dont want to end poverty. They want to make mass poverty.”
That’s the point. If everyone is poor - then no one is poor. True equality - the socialist’s dream.
Probably she remembers with nostalgia...
Couldn’t have said it better.
Piven's problem is that she's thinking that Americans, even disaffected ones, are like the poor in Europe, or anywhere else around the world. In America, even the most poor are financially head and shoulders above the poor anywhere else in the world. Even those who live in our 'ghettos' are in better shape. So, even though they may be angry about their plight, they don't want to bite the hand that, literally, feeds them.
And now, after a year or two of the Tea Party movement, middle and upper-middle class folks are beginning to understand what has been happening to them over the previous 40 years, as a result of ever encroaching government power, and they don't like it.
ping
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