Throughout much of 2009, Glenn Beck extensively covered the “Cloward-Piven Strategy” that was first brought into the public domain in a May 1966 article in The Nation magazine. In the article, Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, two Columbia professors, developed a strategy by which the welfare system could be overwhelmed with demand, broken, and replaced with a “guaranteed annual income.”
Beck has successfully made the argument that the Cloward-Piven Strategy was a blueprint for success at overwhelming that system. Don’t think it worked? Ask the leaders of New York City. The strategy worked so well, the mass rush for welfare benefits bankrupted the city in the 1970s.
So as Beck has brought new light to this strategy, no one has asked Frances Fox Piven’s opinion. Until now.
Piven dismisses Beck’s opinion as “silly.” But she also went a step farther.
“So, it’s an old technique of right-wing ideologues – finding a scapegoat, somebody preferably who is not a farmer, right, an intellectual, and attributing things that go wrong in American society to somebody who’s foreign or dark skinned or an intellectual.”
Actually, that’s what’s silly. So anyone that’s “foreign or dark skinned or an intellectual” can’t be to blame? That’s convenient insulation but not very believable.