Joel B. Pollak says Frances Fox Piven, one of the co-authors of the Cloward-Piven strategy to overwhelm the state with millions of additional welfare claimants, has published an article in the Nation calling for the Occupy Wall Street movement to re-invigorate itself by recruiting the poor.

In a telling admission that Occupy does not, in fact, represent the poor, Piven criticizes both liberals and unions for their repeated use of the term "middle class" in their political campaigns.  Instead, she said, Occupy must appeal to issues that poor Americans care about:

To fully realize an ethic of inclusion, the poorest and most benighted Americans should become part of our protest movement.  We need to increase their numbers at our demonstrations, and we need to undertake the protest actions that deal with their most urgent needs -- including the attacks on the social safety net that hit them hardest.

While remnants of the ACORN organization did, apparently, pay poor people to attend Occupy Wall Street, Piven envisions a strategy that has a clearer ideological component.  Instead of overwhelming the welfare system, as she once advocated, Piven now believes poor people should be mobilized to defend it -- ironically, perhaps, since the long hoped-for possibility of financial insolvency is no longer distant.

Piven believes that an Occupy movement that succeeds in recruiting "a proud and angry" poor could bring about the kind of radical change that the American left had long sought (and which, perhaps, it had hoped to achieve in the Obama presidency):

This could be one of those big turns in American political history, set in motion by indignant people who take to the streets or occupy the factories or the schools.  And it will take an upheaval of historic dimensions to force the reigning financial and business interests and the politicians who kowtow to them to move in new directions, to cede a measure of democratic regulation of finance and business, to give in to policies that empower workers and their unions, to go along with policies that limit the corruption of electoral politics by big money and its propaganda and, not least, to restore and expand the safety net.

For this to happen, the movement has to grow, and it has to include in its ranks the people who have been scorned and abused by corporate domination of our politics.  Not only would OWS gain strength from the participation of the poor; participation in a great movement dedicated to reducing extreme inequality would also transform the poor.  Our society would benefit from that transformation.  A proud and angry poor could help to remake America.

Were it put to a vote, Piven’s proposal for dramatic economic upheaval would probably lose by a margin of… say, 99 percent to 1.

Yet her views are influential within the radical American left–and familiar to its graduates in government, who are less a minority in the Obama administration than they have been in any other.
   
And this radical is on the board of Project Vote! 
   

Frances Fox Piven says, "this spring, we’ll see action"

Madeleine Morgenstern is reporting Piven said:

The Occupy Wall Street movement is entering the phase where it “makes trouble.”

“We’ll see action against the banks, against the corporations.”

Different forms of protests that will engage many people.

Occupy was helped by “sympathetic” press coverage.

Leftist professor and activist Frances Fox Piven last week predicted the Occupy Wall Street movement is entering the phase where it "makes trouble" and will soon be taking action against banks and other institutions.

“It may well be that the Occupy movement is now in its second phase, in the phase where it makes trouble, in the phase where it threatens to shut down institutions,” Piven said.  “The Occupy movement has moved into the neighborhoods of our cities, it has moved into the schools…. This spring, we’ll see action against the banks, against the corporations.”

She added, “It is going to be a spring with lots of protests that take different forms and engage lots of people.”

Piven made her comments during a lecture to a group of students at the University of Connecticut last Friday.  She touched on the genesis of the Occupy movement, which she said was particularly a result of the financial crisis, which “exposed those in charge of the economy as illegitimate.”

“The people who were sitting on top of the world, the top-tenth of the top 1 percent, were guilty. They were guilty of thievery, of chicanery,” Piven said.

That old relic needs to be quietly put out to pasture, or in a certified home for the old and addled. I would love to get in a long line of real Americans wanting  to slap her silly.

Disturbing new Frances Fox Piven audio

Francis Fox Piven admits all the leftist connections.

According to Frances Fox Piven:

• The Occupy Movement is made up of “All parts of the Left.”
• That includes proudly: “Democrats, Socialists, Communists, Anarchists.”
• Must all work together because of the “Huge task of transforming America and the world.”
• “We are all together” 

A little hard to hear.  The unedited version of Piven's speech is here.
 

99% Spring Movement on track to train 100,000 protestors

Micheline Maynard says you may remember reading about The 99% Spring, a protest movement supported by political groups and organized labor that aspires to be the next Occupy movement.

Its 40 co-sponsors include big names the United Auto Workers, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Moveon.org, and UNITE, the hospitality industry union.

When The 99% Spring was announced in February, organizers vowed to train 100,000 people. It looks like they’ll easily make that goal when their training programs kick off next week.

There are already 918 planned around the country. All the group needs is about 10 people at each session to meet its goal, and many of the programs have dozens of participants signed up. (You can look them up by zip code here.) The movement has a Twitter account, @the99spring.

Over the weekend, the UAW sent emails to its members, encouraging them to take part in a training session. The goal is to make The 99% Spring “as big as possible,” the Teamsters said last week. “We’ll learn to tell the story of our economy and what went wrong, and we’ll learn how we can take action and create great change in this country.”

You can read more about The 99% Spring and its roots at our public media project, Changing Gears.

Any chance you’ll be taking part?

She's baaaack!