On Wednesday, Frances Fox Piven was included in an AFL-CIO sponsored National Teach In where she spent a little over ten minutes speaking to students about past protests and their affect on the country, and then she spoke about the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movement as one of those momentous revolutions that is gaining ground. Her comments include the usual social and economic justice rhetoric that we have come to expect from socialists and communists (including strengthening the unions, a ‘big public sector’, and free higher education for everyone), but her comment that, “The slogan of our movement should be ‘Occupy everything because it belongs to us“ is downright disturbing.
“Well maybe, it’s the moment when another great movement is being born. I think it is. I really do think it is. It began pointing to Wall Street with the occupation in Zuccotti Square. That was a good place to point the sword.” – Frances Fox Piven
This woman reminds me of the mullahs that used the Iranian students to overthrown the government and sent Iran into the inner circle of hell that they are now fighting and dying to be free of.
Hopefully, the numerous Ron Paul supporters can enlighten their brethren on the message of freedom, liberty, and peace that is sorely lacking when it comes to socialists and communists who believe that one must take from another even to the point of violence.
Stossel had an excellent show today on the failed Keynesian economics being employed by the liberal/socialist/marxist/communist regime currently in power. The basis for the show was F.A. Hayek’s ‘On The Road To Serfdom’ with guests including Dr. Ron Paul on spending, printing money and the military, Stuart Varney on Greece and the debt wall, James Delingpole on the green movement as hidden socialists, David Mamet’s conversion from being a brain-dead liberal, Ann Coulter on the mob mentality, and my personal favorite brit, Daniel Hannan, on our road to serfdom.
Greta interviewed Sen. Judd Gregg (uncut) on Obamacare, 10.27.2010. I enjoyed the fact that Greta just let the senator speak, and speak he does.
I think he (Obama) underestimates the common sense of the American people. When they look at something like this, they say, ‘hold it, this isn’t gonna work. It’s not going to work for me, it’s not gonna work for my family and it certainly not going to work for the country, and we can’t afford it.’
As this bill becomes more and more, as it starts to go into place, as different parts of the bill start to be actually undertaken and put into action, it just keeps delivering bad news to people. It doesn’t improve our health care system, it doesn’t improve the cost of the health care system, and it certainly doesn’t reduce the size of the government.
An excerpt of the Politico op-ed that Greta is referring to:
President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats promised us that the new law would lower premiums. It has not. Premiums in 2011 will rise more than 12 percent for employer-sponsored coverage, according to a recent Hewitt Associates study. Out-of-pocket costs for workers, meaning co-payments, deductibles and co-insurance, are also likely to rise by almost 13 percent.
We were promised that, if we liked our coverage, we could keep it. But we were misled. The Obama administration recently revealed that employees of nearly 70 percent of U.S. businesses, who get coverage through their job, may lose their current health care plan because of the new regulations. The outlook is even bleaker for employees of small businesses, the backbone of the U.S. economy.
Low-wage workers also stand to suffer as onerous new regulations are implemented. These workers may lose access to their current benefits because the government will prohibit their employers from offering a plan that is affordable and provides substantive benefits for working families. Companies like McDonalds, which help low-income employees with insurance, have put us on notice that they may have to drop coverage.
This particular episode is an excellent history lesson on the Fabian Society’s beginnings in 1884 in England, eugenist George Bernard Shaw, H.G Wells, Margaret Sanger, how the Society influenced the formation of the English Labour Party in 1900, and what the Society has been able to accomplish.
Part 2:
Part 3:
Boston Fabian Society member, Stuart Chase wrote ‘The Road We Are Traveling’ (1932) in which he details events that were occurring at the time that would replace the free enterprise system.
A strong centralized government.
A growing executive arm.
Control of credit, banking, and security exchanges by the government.
Underwriting of employment by the government either through armaments or through public works.
Underwriting of Social Security by the government; old-age pension, unemployment .
Underwriting of food, housing, and medical care.
Use of deficit spending.
Abandonment of gold.
Government control of foreign trade.
Control of natural resources.
Control of energy sources.
Control of transportation.
Control of agricultural production.
Enlistment of the youth corp.
Heavy taxation.
State control of communications.
Stuart Chase also wrote “A New Deal” and was part of FDR’s ‘kitchen cabinet’.
In 1937, the president told Chase’s father that his son was teaching the American people more about economics than any of the others combined. – Beck on Chase
At the core of the Fabian Society were Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Together, they wrote numerous studies of industrial Britain, including alternative co-operative economics that applied to ownership of capital as well as land.
The first Fabian Society pamphlets advocating tenets of social justice coincided with the zeitgeist of Liberal reforms during the early 1900s. The Fabian proposals however were considerably more progressive than those that were enacted in the Liberal reform legislation. The Fabians lobbied for the introduction of a minimum wage in 1906, for the creation of a universal health care system in 1911 and for the abolition of hereditary peerages in 1917[3].
Fabian socialists were in favour of an imperialist foreign policy as a conduit for internationalist reform and a welfare state modelled on the Bismarckian German model; they criticised Gladstonian liberalism both for its individualism at home and its internationalism abroad. They favoured a national minimum wage in order to stop British industries compensating for their inefficiency by lowering wages instead of investing in capital equipment; slum clearances and a health service in order for “the breeding of even a moderately Imperial race” which would be more productive and better militarily than the “stunted, anaemic, demoralised denizens…of our great cities”; and a national education system because “it is in the class-rooms that the future battles of the Empire for commercial prosperity are already being lost”[4].
The Fabians also favored the nationalisation of land, believing that rents collected by landowners were unearned, an idea which drew heavily from the work of American economist Henry George.
Many Fabians participated in the formation of the Labour Party in 1900 and the group’s constitution, written by Sidney Webb, borrowed heavily from the founding documents of the Fabian Society. At the Labour Party Foundation Conference in 1900, the Fabian Society claimed 861 members and sent one delegate.
