Saturday, January 22, 2011

New York Times Whitewashes Marxist Revolutionary Frances Fox Piven

"I have considerable respect for non-violence, but I don’t treat it as inevitably a necessary rule ..."

That's the quote from Frances Fox Piven's discussion at the C-SPAN clip above.

Piven is a long-established Marxist revolutionary of the slow-burn academic variety. She's notorious for her longstanding call to break the American system through a revolt of the masses from below, called
The Cloward-Piven Strategy.

Piven and Cloward

But lately she's been aggressively promoting a more spontaneous form of violent unrest, massed street revolts to topple the American regime.

As reported a couple of weeks ago at The Blaze, "
Frances Fox Piven Rings in The New Year By Calling for Violent Revolution":
She’s considered by many as the grandmother of using the American welfare state to implement revolution. Make people dependent on the government, overload the government rolls, and once government services become unsustainable, the people will rise up, overthrow the oppressive capitalist system, and finally create income equality. Collapse the system and create a new one. That‘s the simplified version of Frances Fox Piven’s philosophy originally put forth in the pages of The Nation in the 60s.

Now, as the new year ball drops, Piven is at it again, ringing in 2011 with renewed calls for revolution.

And see also Matthew Vadum's piece, "Marxist Frances Fox Piven Calls For a Violent Uprising Against the American System."

But you wouldn't know it from the New York Times, which has a piece this morning in the left's classic genre of disinformation and propaganda, "Spotlight From Glenn Beck Brings a CUNY Professor Threats":

On his daily radio and television shows, Glenn Beck has elevated once-obscure conservative thinkers onto best-seller lists. Recently, he has elevated a 78-year-old liberal academic to celebrity of a different sort, in a way that some say is endangering her life.

Frances Fox Piven, a City University of New York professor, has been a primary character in Mr. Beck’s warnings about a progressive take-down of America. Ms. Piven, Mr. Beck says, is responsible for a plan to “intentionally collapse our economic system.”

Her name has become a kind of shorthand for “enemy” on Mr. Beck’s Fox News Channel program, which is watched by more than 2 million people, and on one of his Web sites, The Blaze. This week, Mr. Beck suggested on television that she was an enemy of the Constitution.

Never mind that Ms. Piven’s radical plan to help poor people was published 45 years ago, when Mr. Beck was a toddler. Anonymous visitors to his Web site have called for her death, and some, she said, have contacted her directly via e-mail.

In response, a liberal nonprofit group, the Center for Constitutional Rights, wrote to the chairman of Fox News, Roger Ailes, on Thursday to ask him to put a stop to Mr. Beck’s “false accusations” about Ms. Piven.

“Mr. Beck is putting Professor Piven in actual physical danger of a violent response,” the group wrote.
Notice that? The classic propaganda whitewash. The country's unofficial newspaper of record is mounting a disinformation campaign against Glenn Beck. The MFM has been widely rebuked for its libelous reporting on the Arizona shooting, but there's clearly a demand for stories of this sort, since the political payoff has been considerable. While the Times is at pains to indicate that Piven wrote an article "45 years ago" calling for mass uprising, the piece doesn't report that Piven called for revolt once again, just two weeks ago, in the same journal, The Nation, "Mobilizing the Jobless":
Protests among the unemployed will inevitably be local, just because that's where people are and where they construct solidarities. But local and state governments are strapped for funds and are laying off workers. The initiatives that would be responsive to the needs of the unemployed will require federal action. Local protests have to accumulate and spread -- and become more disruptive -- to create serious pressures on national politicians. 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.

A loose and spontaneous movement of this sort could emerge. It is made more likely because unemployment rates are especially high among younger workers. Protests by the unemployed led by young workers and by students, who face a future of joblessness, just might become large enough and disruptive enough to have an impact in Washington. There is no science that predicts eruption of protest movements. Who expected the angry street mobs in Athens or the protests by British students? Who indeed predicted the strike movement that began in the United States in 1934, or the civil rights demonstrations that spread across the South in the early 1960s? We should hope for another American social movement from the bottom -- and then join it.
These aren't the obscure rants of some raving idiot out in the progressive netroots fever swamps. Piven is establishment. But taking the Times' propaganda one step further is useful idiot Steve Benen:
If you've never heard of Frances Fox Piven, don't feel bad. Up until a couple of weeks ago, I hadn't either. Apparently she wrote some radical stuff about poor people and political activism in 1966, and the voices in Beck's head tell him this is important and relevant in 2011, never mind the fact that the vast majority of liberals haven't read her work and have no idea who she is.

That's a lie. Anyone who reads The Nation knows exactly who she is.

Leftists are liars.

They're liars. They're propagandists. And they're evildoers.

Exit videos from London and Toronto, featuring the kind of spontaneous unrest that Francis Fox Piven wants to bring to America:

See also Left Wing Rebel (via Memeorandum).

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Beck is telling people what Piven says and believes. In the extremely unlikely event she is harmed, it will be because of her beliefs, not because Beck talked about her on TV or wrote about her on a website.

Beck has had to hire security to protect him and his family because he gets so many threats from violent leftists. But the NYT didn't think that deserved mentioning in the hit piece on Beck.

JBW said...

"if Piven gets killed, it's her own fault and not Beck's. A 75 year old woman without a reliablely popular media outlet is so incredibly disadvantaged when compared to the rantings of a man with 2 million viewers every night she deserves to get killed by some random lonely loser he incites to murder."

Anon ( if that is your real name), your very existence is contradictory to reality. And this is why you suck...

Thomas said...

Agreed, but are you really going to justify the comments on The Blaze? Fill her with lead? Email her and call her a cunt? We are BETTER than than. I hate what she stands for, but really:
- “Somebody tell Frances I have 5000 roundas [sic] ready and I’ll give My life to take Our freedom back,”
- “ONE SHOT…ONE KILL!”
- “The only redistribution I am interested in is that of a precious metal…. LEAD,” declared Patriot1952.

Lets fight ideas with ideas. I find Piven deplorable, but these blaze comments are disgusting, as are those emails.

Maggie@MaggiesNotebook said...

Today on his show, Beck addressed the accusations that he has put Piven's life in danger. Anyone watching his show must know that he has never called for violence.

However Fox-Piven has. No doubt she is Obama's mentor. They both have connections to Columbia UNY and the Cloward-Piven strategy is just more of Saul Alinsky. It fits perfectly with Obama signing up all the welfare mothers in Chicago - sending them to City Hall to beat down the doors and gain additional welfare benefits.

How inconvenient for the Left that mainstream America is learning about this woman