Regular viewers of the Glenn Beck program on Fox News Channel know the name Frances Fox-Piven. She is the surviving half of oft-discussed Cloward and Piven, and currently a professor at City University of New York. After many months of silence, Fox-Piven has suddenly come forward and is addressing the statements made by Beck, trying to diminish his theories. On Tuesday Fox-Piven used a British newspaper to attack the Fox News host and his audience, accusing them (and many Americans) of being racist and too dumb to understand how their government works stating;
“The strange stories that Glenn Beck creates with his chalkboard gain traction with Americans, who are made anxious by the large changes that have overtaken the United States, including the election of a black president and the increasing racial diversity of the population, deindustrialisation and the decline of American power abroad, as well as cultural changes in sexual and family norms.”
“Strange stories that Glenn Beck creates?” He is using your own words.
Mrs. Fox-Piven also wrote on the ability of the common man to comprehend what their government is doing;
“In reflection, contemporary government policy is also extraordinarily complicated and difficult to decipher. Healthcare legislative proposals run to many hundreds of pages, and the texts of the regulations to implement them are even longer. And none of this can be understood without a great deal of information about existing healthcare arrangements.”
Last year Congress worked very hard to pass rules for the banking and credit industry that would make their agreements with consumers simpler and easy to understand. Why can’t the same be done for the “extraordinarily complicated and difficult to decipher” legislation like the Healthcare law (over 2000 pages) or the almost 70,000 pages of the tax code?
Beck has frequently quoted from a 45 year old magazine article from Cloward and Piven, detailing in their own words, a plan to overwhelm the American Capitalist system and replace it with one that redistributes the wealth and basically guarantees all citizens an annual income from the government. Oddly enough, their 1966 plan for redistribution was basically a “no questions asked” and “no qualifications required” type of program where the guaranteed government-paid annual income must contain no demands on the recipients as it relates to potentially elevating oneself from poverty;
the right to income must be guaranteed, or the oppression of the welfare poor will not be eliminated. Because benefits are conditional under the present public welfare system, submission to arbitrary governmental power is regularly made the price of sustenance. People have been coerced into attending literacy classes or participating in medical or vocational rehabilitation regimes, on pain of having their benefits terminated.
What kind of horrific government would expect a citizen receiving benefits to learn how to read and write or, God forbid, learn a skill that might lead that person out of poverty and into self-reliance and possibly prosperity?
Last month, Mrs. Fox-Piven stepped back into the public eye, writing another article that garnered significant Beck attention, the second paragraph of the January 10th story titled, “Mobilizing The Jobless,” also referenced on the Glenn Beck Show, contained the following:
So where are the angry crowds, the demonstrations, sit-ins and unruly mobs? After all, the injustice is apparent. Working people are losing their homes and their pensions while robber-baron CEOs report renewed profits and windfall bonuses. Shouldn’t the unemployed be on the march?

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