Frances Fox Piven Calls for a new Cloward-Piven Strategy for Today

Pajamas Media ^ | December 30, 2010 | Ron Radosh

[NTHockey]

Communism is most assuredly the equality of its people. Under Communism, everybody has nothing.

[RayChuang88]

I detest Communism because as a young child in Hong Kong, I heard numerous stories from refugees fleeing China during the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution periods and those stories are nothing short of harrowing.

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.

[NTHockey]

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.

[phockthis]

they can come and collect it 55 grams at a time...

[Inspectorette]

the Great Leap Forward

Real close to PMSNBC's new slogan "Lean forward".

[CoastWatcher]

“These two don’t 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.

[dcwusmc]

Probably she remembers with nostalgia...

[freekitty]

Couldn’t have said it better.

[SuziQ]

Thus Piven asks a question: “So where are the angry crowds, the demonstrations, sit-ins and unruly mobs?”

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.

[r-q-tek86]

ping

[RayChuang88]

The Tea Party movement harken back to the days between 1764 and 1776 when the American colonists protested over the British government trying to pass taxes without the colonists' consent to pay for the cost of the Seven Years' War. Anyone who has read up on American history know that if King George III and Parliament had followed the advice of William Pitt (both Elder and Younger), that mess would have ended in no time flat and the entire North American continent would be a VERY different place indeed today.