Obama-Linked Socialists Encourage Spread of Militant Protests
Trevor Loudon
Emerging Corruption
3/21/2011
According to socialist website In these Times,
The pro-public union protests in Wisconsin over the past month have marked a major turning point in the American political debate over an elite-backed austerity agenda, declares Frances Fox Piven, perhaps America’s foremost authority on social protest movements. “We are on the cusp of a great movement to resist and roll back that corporate domination by banks, energy companies and war profiteers,” Piven and fellow activist/academic Professor Cornell West write in The Nation. They believe that the Wisconsin model of resistance against the elite agenda of endless cutbacks for working people, undertaken in the name of balancing the budget, must be spread across the nation. To help that happen, Piven and West are promoting anational teach-in April 5 on fighting the austerity agenda that will be conducted on dozens of campuses…
…On Dec. 22, 2010, Frances Fox Piven wrote an article for The Nation entitled “Mobilizing the Jobless”.
“”Before 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. They have to go from being hurt and ashamed to being angry and indignant…
Local protests have to accumulate and spread — and become more disruptive — to create serious pressures on national politicians. An effective movement of the unemployed will have to look something like the strikes and riots that have spread across Greece in response to the austerity measures forced on the Greek government by the European Union, or like the student protests that recently spread with lightning speed across England in response to the prospect of greatly increased school fees.
Protests by the unemployed led by young workers and by students, who face a future of joblessness, just might become large enough and disruptive enough to have an impact in Washington…We should hope for another American social movement from the bottom — and then join it.”
Piven and West are applying the “pressure from below”, needed to complement Obama’s “pressure from above.” Obama is using taxes, regulation and debt to destroy the U.S. middle class…
The entire post is at Emerging Corruption
Also at the site, Obama, As Red As It Gets.
