The sociologist and political scientist Frances Fox Piven and her late husband Richard Cloward have been famously credited by Glenn Beck with devising the "Cloward/Piven Strategy," a world view responsible, according to Beck, for everything from creating a "culture of poverty" and fomenting "violent revolution" to causing global warming and the recent financial crisis. Called an "enemy of the people," over the past year Piven has been subjected to an unprecedented campaign of hatred and disinformation, spearheaded by Beck. How is it that a distinguished university professor, past president of the American Sociological Association, and recipient of numerous awards and accolades for her work on behalf of the poor and for American voting rights, has attracted so much negative attention? For anyone who is skeptical of the World According to Beck, here is a guide to the ideas that Glenn fears most. Who's Afraid of Frances Fox Piven? is a concise, accessible introduction to Piven's actual thinking (versus Beck's outrageous claims), from her early work on welfare rights and "poor people's movements," written with her late husband Richard Cloward, through her influential examination of American voting habits, and her most recent work on the possibilities for a new movement for progressive reform. A major corrective to right-wing bombast, this essential book is also a rich source of ideas and inspiration for anyone interested in progressive change.
Piven has embodied the best of American democracy."—The Nation Frances Fox Piven reminds us why we must understand the labor, civil-rights, and anti-imperialist struggles of the Depression era if we are going to advance the struggles of the present. Frances Fox Piven is the author of many important books.
Argues that ordinary people exercise extraordinary political courage and power in American politics when, frustrated by politics as usual, they rise up in anger and hope, and defy the authorities and the status quo rules that ordinarily govern their daily lives. By doing so, they disrupt the workings of important institutions and become a force in American politics. Drawing on critical episodes in U.S. history, Piven shows that it is in fact precisely at those seismic moments when people act outside of political norms that they become empowered to their full democratic potential.
Piven and Cloward have updated their classic work on the history and function of welfare to cover the American welfare state's massive erosion during the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton years. The authors present a boldly comprehensive, brilliant new theory to explain the comparative underdevelopment of the U.S. welfare state among advanced industrial nations. Their conceptual framework promises to shape the debate within current and future administrations as they attempt to rethink the welfare system and its role in American society. "Uncompromising and provocative....By mixing history, political interpretation and sociological analysis, Piven and Cloward provide the best explanation to date of our present situation...no future discussion of welfare can afford to ignore them." —Peter Steinfels, The New York Times Book Review
In this text, social critics Francis Fox Piven and Richard Cloward address the tumultuous politics of the 1970s, 80s and 90s that have culminated in an all-out assault on the American social compact.
While numerous analysts have discussed, and decried, the geopolitical ambitions of the Bush administration and its neoconservative allies, the attention to America's imperial posture overseas has turned eyes away from a crucial dimension of belligerent foreign policy: the domestic politics of war. Frances Fox Piven, one of the most celebrated US social scientists, raises questions others have not. She examines the ways the War on Terror served to reinforce the Bush administration's political base and analyzes the manner in which flag-waving politicians used the emotional fog of war to further their regressive social and economic agendas. Always in the past, US governments that made war sooner or later tried to reward their peoples for the blood and wealth they were forced to sacrifice. During World War II, tax rates on the wealthy rose to 90 percent; toward the end of the Vietnam War, 18-year-olds were given the right to vote.
Have the poor fared best by participating in conventional electoral politics or by engaging in mass defiance and disruption? The authors of the classic Regulating The Poor assess the successes and failures of these two strategies as they examine, in this provocative study, four protest movements of lower-class groups in 20th century America: -- The mobilization of the unemployed during the Great Depression that gave rise to the Workers' Alliance of America -- The industrial strikes that resulted in the formation of the CIO -- The Southern Civil Rights Movement -- The movement of welfare recipients led by the National Welfare Rights Organization.
Americans take for granted that ours is the very model of a democracy. At the core of this belief is the assumption that the right to vote is firmly established. But in fact, the United States is the only major democratic nation in which the less well-off, the young, and minorities are substantially underrepresented in the electorate. Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward were key players in the long battle to reform voter registration laws that finally resulted in the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (also known as the Motor Voter law). When Why Americans Don't Vote was first published in 1988, this battle was still raging, and their book was a fiery salvo. It demonstrated that the twentieth century had witnessed a concerted effort to restrict voting by immigrants and blacks through a combination of poll taxes, literacy tests, and unwieldy voter registration requirements. Why Americans Still Don't Vote brings the story up to the present. Analyzing the results of voter registration reform, and drawing compelling historical parallels, Piven and Cloward reveal why neither of the major parties has tried to appeal to the interests of the newly registered-and thus why Americans still don't vote.
Millions of Americans have read and been galvanized by A People's History of the United States. But many years before Howard Zinn published that epic saga of exploitation and resistance, he was organizing civil-rights protests and agitating for an end to the Vietnam War--and writing about those efforts in the pages of The Nation. From the Atlanta campus of Spelman College (where Zinn taught in the early 1960s) to North Vietnam (where he facilitated the release of American POWs), Zinn was not only an astute observer of history. As Frances Fox Piven writes in the introduction to Some Truths Are Not Self-Evident, "These Nation essays remind us that for nearly fifty years Zinn himself was deeply involved in the major twentieth-century struggles for social justice in the United States." The book also includes later Zinn articles on George W. Bush's wars--on terror, in Iraq, against the poor--as well as a selection of Nation articles about Zinn, concluding with Eric Foner's 2010 obituary for the historian who "was not afraid to speak out about the difference between right and wrong." Nowhere has Zinn's courage and commitment to speaking out been as evident as in Some Truths Are Not Self Evident: Essays in The Nation on Civil Rights, Vietnam and the "War on Terror.
The sociologist and political scientist Frances Fox Piven and her late husband Richard Cloward have been famously credited by Glenn Beck with devising the "Cloward/Piven Strategy," a world view responsible, according to Beck, for everything from creating a "culture of poverty" and fomenting "violent revolution" to causing global warming and the recent financial crisis. Called an "enemy of the people," over the past year Piven has been subjected to an unprecedented campaign of hatred and disinformation, spearheaded by Beck. How is it that a distinguished university professor, past president of the American Sociological Association, and recipient of numerous awards and accolades for her work on behalf of the poor and for American voting rights, has attracted so much negative attention? For anyone who is skeptical of the World According to Beck, here is a guide to the ideas that Glenn fears most. Who's Afraid of Frances Fox Piven? is a concise, accessible introduction to Piven's actual thinking (versus Beck's outrageous claims), from her early work on welfare rights and "poor people's movements," written with her late husband Richard Cloward, through her influential examination of American voting habits, and her most recent work on the possibilities for a new movement for progressive reform. A major corrective to right-wing bombast, this essential book is also a rich source of ideas and inspiration for anyone interested in progressive change.
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