Back in the mid-'60's, Frances Fox Piven wrote an article about poverty that "proposed that if people overwhelmed the welfare rolls, fiscal and political stress on the system could force reform and give rise to changes like a guaranteed income. By drawing attention to the topic, the proposal 'had a big impact' even though it was not enacted, Ms. Piven said. 'A lot of people got the money that they desperately needed to survive, she said."
Obviously, the woman was quite mad and ought to have been declared insane, albeit not insane enough to escape the death-threat penalty. Piven, however, survived. Now 78, she still teaches at CUNY and is highly respected. But not by everyone. Glenn Beck has fastened onto that 45-year-old article and, as a result of invective Beck has posted on his website, the professor is receiving death threats.
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.
So now we have a direct connection, recent and provable, between Beck's invective and death threats. Fox will not intervene or ask Beck to cease and desist.
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.
Fox News disagrees. Joel Cheatwood, a senior vice president, said Friday that Mr. Beck would not be ordered to stop talking about Ms. Piven on television. He said Mr. Beck had quoted her accurately and had never threatened her.
Beck also links Obama to the long-gone poverty article.
In Mr. Beck’s telling on a Fox broadcast on Jan. 5, 2010, Ms. Piven and Mr. Cloward [Piven's co-author and husband who died in 2001] planned “to overwhelm the system and bring about the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with impossible demands and bring on economic collapse.” Mr. Beck observed that the number of welfare recipients soared in the years after the article, and said the article was like “economic sabotage.”
He linked what he termed the Cloward-Piven Strategy to President Obama’s statement late in the 2008 presidential campaign that “we are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”...NYT
Glenn Beck stays at Fox, snug as a bug in a rug. When someone is threatened and the death threats get publicity, Fox's ratings go up. So Fox won't intervene.
Piven is being further excoriated about wondering -- out loud -- why the heck the jobless and homeless in America aren't protesting -- allegedly that's further proof that she is out to destroy capitalism. Her work and home addresses have been published.
This is from The Nation's article about the threats against Piven on Beck's website:
"Why is this woman still alive?" asked capnjack. "Mainly because you haven't killed her, I imagine. See, someone that really cares and has the courage of their conviction must actually DO SOMETHING," responded Diamondback. And the calls for assassination are not limited to Piven. As Civilunrestnow put it in a post that perfectly captures the tenor of right-wing eliminationist fantasy, "I say bring it. 90 million legal gun owners with over 220 million legal firearms, MOST in the hands of people who claim to be center RIGHT. I think it's time to reduce the surplus population of leeches, lay abouts, left wing nut jobs, the main stream media, liberal politicians and MOST defense attorneys."
___
Keith Olbermann quit MSNBC last night in what appears to be a sudden "retirement" prearranged with the network. MSNBC is about to become part of Comcast. That corporate takeoever may or may not be a factor in Olbermann's dive overboard.
