Despicable race gambit: What the GOP really wants to achieve by talking about poverty

[DonViejo]

Glenn Beck's most hated scholar, Frances Fox Piven, on the right's deplorable strategy to win more white votes

JOSH EIDELSON

Wednesday brought the 50th anniversary of President Johnson’s speech announcing a “War on Poverty,” and with it a speech from Senator Marco Rubio declaring that war an expensive failure. The same day, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor gave an address contending, “School choice is the surest way to break this vicious cycle of poverty…” Those high-profile Republicans were followed by Congressman Paul Ryan, who argued Thursday against “dumping money into programs we know won’t work.”

For a different view, Salon spoke last week with Frances Fox Piven, the veteran scholar of poor people’s movements who drew a new round of notoriety when she became a top target of Glenn Beck (“Maybe they thought I was dead, so that they would have a mythical villain,” Piven told Salon last year). In a wide-ranging interview, Piven accused Rubio of exploiting racial fears, compared Obama’s handling of poverty to Hoover’s, and blamed social scientists for contributing to contempt for the poor. She defended her 1966 blueprint for forcing a “political crisis” through mass welfare enrollment, and said it would be “worth trying” today. And she offered her own assessment of the War on Poverty: a set of programs made possible because social movements threatened “ungovernability in American cities,” which “produced a very significant compression in income disparities,” and helped elites to “curb an emerging movement among poor people…”

“There may come a time when it’s impossible to co-opt and to integrate, because either the state doesn’t have the resources to do it, or the discontents are so deep,” said Piven, now a professor of political science and sociology at the City University of New York. “In a way, I don’t look forward to that time, because I don’t know then what will happen.” An edited and condensed version of our conversation follows.

Marco Rubio says it’s time to declare “Big government’s War on Poverty a failure.” Is he right?

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http://www.salon.com/2014/01/13/gops_racial_strategy_on_poverty_frances_fox_piven_unloads/

[SamKnause]

1. Rubio

No, he is wrong.

He is wrong on every issue facing this country.

He supports all the policies that are devouring this country from the inside out.

He believes in total corporate control over the U.S.

He does not believe in separation of church and state.

If I lived in a country of sane and informed citizens, this person would have never been elected to any office.

That he has made it on the world stage says volumes about the nose dive this country is taking.

I don't want any person living anywhere in the world to think I agree, or support him, his constituents, or his like minded fellow politicians.

The MAJORITY of Americans do not support him, his ideas, or his party.

The MAJORITY of Americans do not support what our tax dollars have been used for.

[1StrongBlackMan]

2. Posted to for later reading. n/t