Francis Scott Piven rings in the New Year by calling for violent revolution

Glenn Beck managed to get a copy of the upcoming issue of The Nation. She may be in for a surprise as to who is prepared to “rise up”. I had thought this fine couple had bitten the dust. Apparently Frances thinks the time has come to speak out once again. Here tis from the Blaze:

She’s considered by many as the grandmother of using the American welfare state to implement revolution. Make people dependent on the government, overload the government rolls, and once government services become unsustainable, the people will rise up, overthrow the oppressive capitalist system, and finally create income equality. Collapse the system and create a new one. That‘s the simplified version of Frances Fox Piven’sphilosophy originally put forth in the pages of The Nationin the 60s.

Now, as the new year ball drops, Piven is at it again, ringing in 2011 with renewed calls for revolution.

In a chilling and almost unbelievable editorial again in The Nation (”Mobilizing the Jobless,” January 10/17, 2011 edition), she calls on the jobless to rise up in a violent show of solidarity and force. As before, those calls are dripping with language of class struggle. Language she and her late husband Richard Cloward made popular in the 60s.

“So where are the angry crowds, the demonstrations, sit-ins and unruly mobs?” she writes. “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? Why aren’t they demanding enhanced safety net protections and big initiatives to generate jobs?” [Emphasis added]

“[B]efore people can mobilize for collective action, they have to develop a proud and angry identity and a set of claims that go with that identity,” she writes. “They have to go from being hurt and ashamed to being angry and indignant.”

And along with anger must come a denunciation of personal responsibility. Instead, workers must realize that others have put them in their current, uneasy situation: “[T]he out-of-work have to stop blaming themselves for their hard times and turn their anger on the bosses, the bureaucrats or the politicians who are in fact responsible.”

Only then, once their rage has been properly stoked, can the angry take action. And when they do, sh says, the “protesters need targets.” Read more here from the Blaze

 

Bashing Baby Boomers – Expected to Drain Medicare

First I thought it was a slow news weekend. Medicare, Social Security and Boomers are a top story. A cynic by nature, I was willing to give it a pass this time. It did seem scripted, all networks, news media on the same page. Then I caught this vid over at Crooks and Liars with ABC News giving us this not so subtle anymore spin to this tired story for me. Ah, light bulb goes off. The damnable greedy baby boomers are now the new class to wage warfare against. If they would just take the pain bill, go to hospice, all would be solved.

H/T: Crooks and Liars

Those Baby Boomers are sucking all the money out of the Treasury because they’re just so damned selfish! And only some of them served in Viet Nam! Pay attention to the lies scattered throughout. Dear God, it’s going to be another one of those years:

Click on “watch on You Tube” when it appears.

 

ABC News:

The first baby boomers will turn 65 Jan. 1, beginning a flood of applications for Medicare benefits that experts fear could drain the economy and hold political repercussions for President Obama.

The baby boomer generation marked a huge reproductive uptick between 1946 and 1964, when 76 million children were born, creating a higher demand across the nation for schools and consumer products, and an upheaval in popular culture.

But this post-World War II generation’s overwhelming demand on the Medicare system could possibly leave future generations with a bigger bill.

Medicare currently covers 46 million people, costing the government about $500 billion a year. But when the last of the iconic generation reaches 65 in about 20 years, more than 80 million people will be eligible for Medicare coverage, although the number of working people paying into the program will have decreased from 3.5 per person receiving benefits to 2.3.

The increase in the number of people eligible for benefits paired with the rising costs of health care and longer life spans threatens the program’s sustainability. It could force the administration and Congress to come up with a plan to reduce costs, either by cutting benefits or raising taxes.

A recent Associated Press-GfK poll found that 61 percent of Americans favored raising taxes in lieu of slashing benefits. The poll included adults in their 20s, who potentially could end up paying more into the system.

Fifty-one percent opposed the idea of giving older Americans a fixed payment to use against the cost of private insurance, an option made popular by Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis. Sixty-three percent opposed raising the age of eligibility.