GRANDMOTHER OF COMMUNITY ORGS CALLING FOR REVOLUTION

Her name is Frances Fox Piven and in the 1960's, with her husband Richard Cloward came up with a strategy to overwhelm government entitlement programs until they could no longer support the angry masses that demanded to be taken care of. The resulting revolt was the goal of their National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO). In a recent column written by Piven, she appears to be calling for a physical revolution. Ron Radosh at Pajamas Media provides an analysis of Piven's latest missive that appears in the far left Nation magazine:

Via Pajamas Media:

Now, as our national economy and many state and city budgets again are at the breaking point, Frances Fox Piven has issued a new call to repeat and build upon the ruinous strategies that she and her late husband advanced decades ago. And as in 1966, her vehicle is The Nation, the flagship magazine of the Left which today has a huge circulation and much greater influence than it had in the 1960s.

Writing in the current issue, Piven presents [4] 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 magazine’s 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.

Later, Piven outwardly calls for uprisings here in the United States similar to what's going on in Greece and Great Britain. Here is the relevant excerpt from Piven's piece:

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.

Radosh ends his analysis on a positive note, pointing to the fact that NWRO no longer exists and ACORN has been significantly crippled. That said, there is a noticeable increase in incendiary rhetoric coming from the left lately.

Here is a video of Piven from 2004 explaining her take on when violence is acceptable:



h/t to The Blaze