The Teach-In Lives!

[Geee]

Weekly Standard:

A lady who seemed to be stage-managing the event delivered some nonprogressive instructions. “Keep your voices down,” she told the students and senior citizens who made up the audience. “If you don’t agree with something, keep it to yourself.” Clearly this was not going to be Grant Park, 1968. The panelists walked on stage and took their seats. A thin woman with brown-gray hair and dangling gold earrings approached the lectern. “My name is Frances Fox Piven,” she said. “I want to welcome you to the first national teach-in on corporate greed and false austerity, debt, and how we’re going to fight back.”

From time immemorial Fox Piven has toiled in the dank and crowded back alley where academia and radical politics meet. She and her late husband Richard Cloward became famous in the ’60s and ’70s for urging poor people to mau-mau the government. But it wasn’t until 2009, when a researcher for right-wing media personality Glenn Beck found an article the couple had written for the Nation 40 years earlier, that Piven became a fixation of the right and martyr for the left. (Cloward died in 2001.) The piece in question was titled “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty.”

The way to end poverty, Piven and Cloward argued, was to increase local and state welfare rolls to the point where the federal government had no option but to step in and institute a guaranteed annual income. Obviously the idea was a dud that went nowhere. But one can see how it appealed to Beck, who dubbed it the “Cloward-Piven strategy” and used it to suggest that Americans were unwitting actors in a sinister socialist drama scripted long ago.

Beck was wrong in thinking Piven and Cloward ought to be feared. To the contrary: Decades of academic research, countless books and articles and lectures, more than 25 years teaching at the City University of New York, and what has Frances Fox Piven come up with?

“Do we have the Tree of Corporate Destruction?” she asked the audiovisual crew. On the wall behind Piven there appeared a frightening black and white image of a tree whose branches bore the logos of major corporations. On the ground beneath the tree were two fallen limbs, with branches labeled “schools,” “civil servants,” “higher education,” “retirement,” “the safety net,” and so on. The trunk bore the name Glenn Beck, in large block letters. Below that an image of Ronald Reagan. And below that were the words “Corporate Personhood”: a legal principle that, according to the Tree of Corporate Destruction, has given rise to huge conglomerates that sever the American social contract in pursuit of profit.