Obama-Linked Socialists Encourage Spread of Militant Protests

Two Obama-linked socialists are planning a national "Teach-in" to help intensify and spread protests against state budget cuts and austerity measures.

Frances Fox Piven and Cornel West, both leaders of the U.S.'s largest Marxist organization, Democratic Socialists of America, are planning to link up with activists across the U.S. on April 5 to encourage further militant actions.

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 a national teach-in April 5 on fighting the austerity agenda that will be conducted on dozens of campuses. 

Fox Piven and her late husband and D.S.A. comrade Richard Cloward, were the originators of the infamous "Cloward - Piven Strategy" - a policy of deliberately overloading state welfare systems to the point of bankruptcy. It appears that now Piven wants to push states underwater by blocking their ability to resist exorbitant labor union demands. The main culprit is of course the government workers union, American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees which is controlled by Piven and West's Democratic Socialists of America comrades.


Fox Piven has been an endorser of both Feminists for Peace and Barack Obama, and Progressives for Obama. In the mid 1990s Fox Piven and Cornel West were both leading members of the New Party, a joint D.S.A./SEIU/ACORN/Institute for Policy Studies project designed to move the Democratic Party to the far left.

Barack Obama was a leading activist with the Chicago New Party from approximately 1993 to 1996.

West, Obama - Apollo Theater, 11.29.07

West, a one time leader of D.S.A.'s race-baiting African American Commission has more direct ties to Barack Obama. In 2008 West was a member, along with radical Harvard law professor  and Obama mentor Charles Ogletree, of the Barack Obama's Black Advisory Council.

West was also a supporter of Progressives for Obama and served on the board of  PFO's parent organization, Movement for a Democratic Society, - where he worked with long time Obama associates, the former Weather Underground terrorist leaders Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.

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.

Frances Fox Piven, Cornel West and their D.S.A. and Communist Party USA comrades are using welfare beneficiaries, students and labor unions to ratchet up the pressure.

Make no mistake - Frances Fox Piven, Cornel West, Democratic Socialists of America and their nearly  30 year comrade Barack Obama are waging an undeclared war on Middle America.