I wonder how many of you are aware of the “Cloward-Piven” strategy. Anyone? No shame if you’re not; that simply means you don’t spend much time listening to or watching Glenn Beck.
Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven published an essay in The Nation magazine back in 1966 in which they argued, essentially, that the unemployed and the working poor should organize themselves and take to the streets to remind politicians that they are there and that their needs are as deserving of attention as any other socio-economic group in this country.
Those of you (like me) who are old enough to remember 1966 will also remember that demonstrations and street protests were not exactly a novel idea. Anti-war groups were doing it, women’s groups were doing it, African-American groups were doing it. With a few exceptions (notable because they were exceptions), these demonstrations were non-violent, aimed only at forcing politicians to address what the groups saw as legitimate grievances. That’s precisely what Cloward and Piven advocated in this article.
Glenn Beck, who finds dire left wing conspiracies under virtually every rock, discovered the Cloward-Piven article about a year ago. What apparently caught his attention was a statement in it that read, “poor people [should] claim their lawful benefits from the welfare system.” To Beck, that was clearly a call to redistribute wealth in a socialist manner.
At first he restricted his railing to diatribes against that article and the “socialist” agenda it clearly supported. Eventually, as is common with Beck when his initial rants don’t create much traction, he upped the ante by connecting Piven with eight other individuals whom he dubbed part of an “intelligent minority” who were leading a surreptitious attack on the American economy and whose ultimate goal was bringing down the American government. Not surprisingly, if you know Beck, as Jeffrey Goldberg pointed out in The Atlantic, eight of the nine (including Piven) are Jewish.
Beck became completely unglued when, in January, Piven published another essay in The Nation suggesting that the jobless are not likely to have much help from Washington, or from the states, unless they mobilize. Here is the paragraph in Piven’s article that sent Beck into apoplexy.
“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 CEO’s report renewed profits and windfall bonuses. Shouldn’t the unemployed be on the march? Why aren’t they demanding enhanced safety net protections and big initiatives to generate jobs?”
Sedition is perhaps in the eyes of the beholder, but to these eyes that paragraph doesn’t ask for anything particularly scary. Demonstrating to protest grievances is a tradition nearly as old as this country. It’s certainly not as scary as Tea Bag Party meetings that resound with angry calls to “Take back out country.”
It so frightened Beck however that he took to the air on his TV show and argued in the plaintive tones only he can project that Piven and Cloward (her late husband) are the “people who you would say are fundmentally responsible for the unsustainability and possible collapse of our economic system.” The top headline for his on-line news site, The Blaze, read “Frances Fox Piven Rings in the New Year by Calling for Violent Revolution.” On his Feb. 7 TV show, he labeled her an “Enemy of the Constitution.”
This would all be laughable were it not for the fact that there are a lot of Beck-ites in radio and TV land who listen to this idiot, and not only listen to him but take his ravings seriously. Here is a small sample of the comments posted on Beck’s web site.
“Maybe they should burst through the fron [sic] dor of this arrogant elitist and slit the hateful cow’s throat.”
“We should blow up Piven’s office and home.”
“Big lots is having a rope sale I hear, you buy the rope and I will hang the wench. I will spin her as she hangs.”
“Somebody tell Frances I have 5000 roundas [sic] ready and I’ll give my Life to take Our freedom back.”
“ONE SHOT . . . ONE KILL.”
“The only redistribution I am interested in is a precious metal . . . LEAD.”
Piven also received e-mails that said things like, “Die you cunt.” Another implored her to “go back to Canada you bitch,” while another left her with the kind wish, “may cancer find you soon.”
Beck and the rest of the Fox Noise gasbags tripped all over themselves after the Giffords shooting to assure the world that her attacker was a lone-wolf madman and that what they said on their TV and radio shows had no influence on people like him. The kind of comments Beck’s rants against Piven have prompted make one think perhaps the opposite may be true.
What’s worse is that they know—or surely should know—that it is. Scott Roeder, the man who killed Dr. George Tiller, made several statements indicating he was influenced by Bill O’Reilly’s incessant labeling of the doctor as “Tiller the baby killer.” And Beck can’t possibly pretend he hasn’t heard of Byron Williams.
In case some of you haven’t heard that name before, just this past July Williams, a convicted bank robber, donned body armor and got in a car with 9 mm Glock (pattern here?), a shotgun and a .308 rifle loaded with armor piercing bullets. He set off with that small arsenal for San Francisco where he intended to shoot and kill as many people as possible at the Tides Foundation, a liberal activist group that Beck had targeted on his show at least 29 times. As fate would have it, his driving was erratic enough to attract police attention. He was pulled over and after a gunfight, was subdued and arrested. Some of the things he said to the police are frightening.
His goal, he said, was to kill “people of importance at the Tides Foundation and the ACLU [another frequent Beck target],” in order to “start a revolution.” But here’s the salient point. He told the police, “I would have never started watching Fox News if it wasn’t for the fact that Beck was on there. And it was the things that he did, it was the things he exposed that blew my mind.”
I’ve written on this subject before, but while the First Amendment does guarantee free speech, implicit in that guarantee is the word “responsible.” We don’t have a First Amendment right to knowingly lie, nor a right, figuratively, to yell fire in a crowded theatre. Cable TV, especially Fox, and the internet have so distended the intention of the First Amendment that it has become almost unrecognizable.
What can be done?
Well, a few things perhaps. We have laws on the books now designating certain kinds of crimes as “hate crimes.” Could we not craft laws that make felonies of “hate speech” as well? When published speech openly threatens someone’s life (see “slit the hateful cow’s throat” above), should that not be prosecutable? But what about speech that doesn’t openly threaten someone, but does say things about them that are not true? When Beck takes the innocuous words quoted above from Piven’s article and uses them to call her an “enemy of the constitution,” why is that not criminal?
As I noted in one of my previous blogs, to my mind at least, the easiest and surest way to tone down the vitriol in today’s public discourse is to make everyone contributing to that discourse responsible for having his/her facts correct. When Beck accuses a 78 year old woman of “calling for violent revolution,” should we not expect him to produce more as evidence than her musing that the poor might get more attention if they organized? Piven is not advocating insurrection any more than Martin Luther King, Jr. was, and any fool with one eye and half sense should be expected to see that.
As for the internet, I suspect one very small change would do a lot of good. Let’s stop letting people post on the internet using monikers like Patriot1952 (he’s the one only interested in the redistribution of lead). My guess is that people would be more circumspect about what they post if they had to give their name and address to the world. And if they posted things like “ONE SHOT . . . ONE KILL” anyway, it would be easier to find them and arrest them for hate speech.
It’s easy for even semi-intelligent people to laugh at the absurd ramblings of Beck, Hannity, Malkin, O’Reilly and the rest of the Fox stable. They are frequently so over-the-top and so removed from anything resembling truth or reality that the only thing we can do is choose whether to laugh or cry. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people out there who don’t necessarily rise to the level even of semi-intelligence, and they take the drivel of the Becks of the world seriously. And that leads only to tears.
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