and sociology at the graduate center at the city university of new york she gained notoriety for an article she co-wrote with sociologist richard clarke one nine hundred ninety six that advocated increased in rollman in social welfare programs in order to collapse the dysfunctional parts of that system and force reforms leading to a guaranteed annual income as a political strategy is now known as the cloud given strategy has been a hot topic of discussion in recent years professor pivot has served as the president of the american sociological association is currently an honorary chair of the democratic socialists of america she's one of the people responsible for the fact that you can register to vote at the d.m.v. in one thousand nine hundred three she co-founded humans serve an organization with the goal of increasing voter registration by linking vehicle registration with access to social services and voting human service initiative was incorporated into the national voter registration act of one thousand nine hundred three more commonly known as the motor voter bill and signed into law by president bill

clinton in addition to numerous scholarly articles professor cohen is the author of a dozen books the latest being who is afraid of frances pox fox been the essential writings of the professor glenn beck loves to hate it's my honor to welcome professor proven from our studios in new york city welcome thanks for being with us i'm. so glad for the chance to talk with you thank you i'd like to start in a way that might be kind of backwards start with the reaction to your activism and philosophy and then work back from there over the course of this roughly half hour we have into exactly what you've been arguing for all these years and what you really believe that that if that's ok with you share. while the reaction to the. obvious reaction to. what i write about and what i do the political work i do to work with a lot of work is with poor people. the obvious reaction with the reaction of the

organized right led by glenn back in fact if i if i could speak to that i've got to share with our viewers a little piece of that record some time you want to glenn beck's regular punching bags here's just a very quick example by me. fred says you got to wait you haven't destroyed the economy enough you can slave the people that are orange juice is still affordable our gas is still affordable we can still afford most of our shirts and a lot of people you know have jobs keep killing the jobs and food deflating the money francis fox pivot and who claims to be on the left who says we need riots like that in america are dangerous there are an awful lot of people in america that would like to exploit those mistakes equal number that would like to bury them and forget them to people really want to destroy it. well people like clarke pivot. francis i've got death threats from glenn beck mentioning

me but he was really well against you and the results seem to been pretty dramatic dramatic can you tell us what happened when beck went after you repeatedly on his t.v. show and on his website. well he had been going after me for months before i even found out about it i don't listen to glenn beck. but. couple of people came to my house to interview me claiming they were students at western michigan university. and. i said ok and i said they could have an hour and then clips from their interview showed up. and breitbart very conservative blog. and i began then to google i googled the names of the students the ostensible students and i googled myself and i found that i was a regular target of glenn beck and then i also found myself all over other right

wing blogs. and i found hundreds and hundreds of postings by people who wanted to kill me and who promised to kill me and who said they had all these guys with deer hunting rifles who are ready to come and get me and then one of the right wing blogs put my address on the internet and i just covered that they were following me around where wherever i went i went to speak for example to a little meeting of retirees in my union and. the audio from that meeting was transcribed glenn beck's blog the blaze. and then oh yes i have to tell you about this

i came back to school after a break and my students had put on the door of my office this big blow up glenn beck's chart board which was called the tree of revolution and the tree the trunk of the tree was me and richard clarke and then there were branches going after s.d.s. acorn welfare rights barack obama the financial crisis george soros it was really lunacy really crazy. but you know i think that this kind of lunatic propaganda. gives some people a kind of crutch through which they can understand the very difficult to understand changes that have overtaken the united states anyway. and glenn beck

gave me a little megaphone to. attack on the term hartman share. of democracy now how to do york times wrote about it the guardian. and the chronicle of higher education everybody wanted me to speak and then my publisher wanted to put together a collection. of all my writings from the very beginning. and the reason they want to do it is they thought that glenn beck would increase sales so that was nice yeah i guess there's some a silver lining in everything do you think that glenn beck and others on the right wing fringe have waged such a relentless campaign to demonize you either a because you know genuine philosophical disagreement and you have explicitly you know laid out your opinions in numerous venues over the years or b. because it's just kind of sloppy journalism they found one of many people who are

saying things that are relatively progressive and they build a whole conspiracy theory around you much of which. is exaggerated to to to to i think to say the least. well sure it's exaggerated it's a kind of crazy actually. but i don't think it's sloppy journalism i think it's a kind of technique they have they take out scapegoats they name them i mean sometimes they are figures that things so unlikely as scapegoats glenn beck after all finally named woodrow wilson as the the father progressivism and progressivism led to everything else that was wrong in the united states fairly. early roosevelt it's right but the scapegoat state there's

a kind of method in there lunacy and the method is to turn groups or individuals who have been champions. of rights of ordinary people the political rights or economic rights of ordinary people i think that's why i was named and i don't think it's accidental that identified the sort of the. the damning article which was called the weight of the poor strategy to end poverty as an article that laid out a plan for a campaign to reform welfare it was a campaign to help people get their rights under the welfare system now that's and they called it a campaign or a blueprint to bring down capitalism which of course it was now there was a very modest compared to their description of it if it's actually not so modest to

reform welfare it's a hard thing to do. it was a lease of reform project which they described as a prop project to bring down the country it was true madness but look at what they use they used a campaign to increase the economic well being of poor people why didn't they go after acorn well they went after acorn because acorn was the largest organization grassroots organization of poor people many of them african-americans in the country that's why they went after acorn why did big why did they name the welfare rights organization as part of the tree of revolution or why did they name george soros or why even do they name barack obama and why do they face ludicrous things about barack obama they're demonizing particular

people who are associated with the politics of the left but really the politics of the bottom of americans the siamese the politics of working people the politics of poor people who are trying to make life a little bit better for themselves who are trying to enhance their dignity in american society all of this is poise. and to the right and so i became a scapegoat and you know i'm not sorry because it gave me a chance to answer back and you've done so brilliantly repeatedly you write a you just mentioned the way to the poor way to end poverty the article you wrote we have about three minutes till the break and then we can pick up a little more after that but in that relatively short time can you summarize what your strategy was that you were suggesting. well we had been doing richard nine had

been doing some research on poverty and agency services in new york and then we duplicated the research for other cities and their research . that there were perhaps as many as two families with incomes lower than welfare eligibility levels for every family that actually received welfare benefits that suggested something that we had observed on the ground by working on the lower east side that welfare was turning people away who were eligible giving them bus tickets back to the fat for example. so we thought about that wondered about that. and made a proposal that social workers advocates community organizers and the poor themselves should learn about welfare regulations learn about welfare

eligibility criteria and launch a campaign informing people about their rights to welfare and then help people get those rights. well we thought that if that were to happen. and this was in the mid one nine hundred sixty s. if that were to happen in one nine hundred sixty s. it would create a lot of pressure in city politics and in city finances because a lot of these people were african-americans there was a lot of racial tension building in the cities and the cities were also financially stressed but the cities were also very important blocs in the national democratic coalition so national democratic politicians would want to do something to relieve the political conflicts and the fiscal stresses in the city and what would they do well they could reform welfare they could make it

a national program instead of a grant in aid program that put large fiscal burdens and ultimately political burdens on the cities and on the state governments in industrial states well we weren't so wrong about that because. in. after when even nixon after he won the presidency in one nine hundred sixty eight proposed a guaranteed income program of a sort of fat up program and ultimately he did take the initiative in federalizing some of the welfare programs the programs that aided the aged the blind and the disabled a.f.d.c. was a little bit too tarnished for nixon to take on. but even

without federalizing the big welfare program a lot of people got the benefits to which they were entitled and it's the result of the campaign. and that was not a bad thing it's not a bad thing when government reaches out and gives assistance to the most downtrodden people in our communities the people who are most in faltered. so much of our discussion so much about propaganda it's a good thing i believe and that's what i worked for you and you did a marvelous job will be i'd like to get your thoughts going forward on what's going on with the occupy wall street and where we move forward from here and the democratic socialists of america will be back with more conversations with great minds and professor francis fox proven in just a moment. we

just put a picture of me when i was like nine years old so if you tell the truth. i think i am a total get of friends that i would rather have coffee and. she was kind of the jester but. i'm very proud of the rule that out you see it's a place. to go back to conversations with great minds tonight i'm speaking with francis fox of an author academic and professor of political science and sociology dr proven i'm curious your thoughts on the occupy wall street movement and if it's in any way

a fulfillment of the things that you were suggesting prophesies hoping for or well i don't put words in your mouth what are your thoughts on that on the occupy wall street. well i think occupy is wonderful and it's a blessing to the entire country except being maybe the one percent. a lot of my work has been about protest movements in american history and i believe as a result of the studies that i've done i believe that american democracy our electoral representative arrangements if they are allowed to go on their own course. they don't work very well they don't work very well partly because of defects in our system of representation partly because the

population is not entirely as it's not completely enfranchise but they also don't work well because the assumption of an electoral representative democracy is that money social inequality can find its way into electoral representative arrangements for the always stance and again again in the absence of protest movements there is a kind of steady erosion of the rights that are sometimes won by ordinary people through a combination of protest movements and elections. so when did those protest movements occur they occurred the american revolution the abolition of the movement the populist movement the labor movement the civil rights movement the black freedom movement in the north those protest movements were all a blessing for the country because they were

a corrective to the distortions to that result from the influence of money and status on american politics well when do they current will they occur i think when inequalities become extreme. because extreme inequality is a contradiction with the democratic promise but it's not just the increase in inequality which occurred in the gilded age which occurred in the one nine hundred twenty s. and which occurred again an heir own time but it's also conditions which show in a way how illegitimate the aggrandizement of wealth and income by a few was has been and is in our own time well after the movements of the one nine hundred sixty s. and seventy's subsided. corporations mobilized politically they created new

political organizations they poured money and lobbyists into washington d.c. they stripped unions of their government protections they rolled back regulations on workplace safety they rolled back taxes on the wealthy. i may chip away at the safety net and they did that all through using money to to infiltrate electoral politics and to dominate our legislature and our president and our state governments and our local governments well whenever session came the great recession the financial crisis there was a kind of exposure of the both the air responsibility the incompetence and in many cases the criminality of the people who were controlling the steering

wheel of our financial capitalism and there's one story and one scandal after another became public the legitimacy. of a capitalist economy that was hurting so many people that was driving all of some much of our wealth and their income so much of our opportunities for prosperity and community to the very top of our society began that legitimacy began to erode but still you know nothing happen that was way back in two thousand and eight two thousand and nine two thousand and ten and then came occupy in september of this year now that was a kind of it was a kind of natural moment because occupy started it was not to many people it was

in a little park called zuccotti park. and they had a brilliant slogan the slogan was occupy wall street. and you know everybody sort of knew that wall street was the problem but nobody had said it in that bold way and then they said we are the ninety nine percent they are the one percent and that resonated as well because you know we are the ninety nine percent is the slogan that roughly captures the shift of wealth and income away from most of us to the top one percent and with it you know there were only you know a few hundred people in zuccotti park but more people started to come and the first the press laughed at them the mainstream media they said that they were these

hippies these character cultural people they play drums their clothes are a little funky they can have a program they can have demands. as time went on and particularly after the encounter between the occupiers and the police on the brooklyn bridge that was their video. brilliant my and shown all over the country. the press began to wonder to change and to treat the occupiers with a little more respect that. more respect and then they face great they repeated what the occupiers told them and they actually covered all sorts of things about the occupation the new york times food section even a feature occupies kitchen and that man. message

of occupy was getting out there and the occupation spread around the country and they spread around the world there were occupations everywhere it was a brilliant communication strategy and the message was. clear and so resonant. and. they refused to make the list of complicated demands for legislative change because their message was so clear the big problem in the united states was extreme any quality and this is in this first stage of the movement you know movement stone occur with one big explosion movements occur with many little explosions and they grow and they spread and they're not over in a moment either they last a decade or a decade not half and this movement is spreading i think that mayors who

decided to clear the encampments. made a big mistake because. i think the clearing by police did mark the end of what might be called the first symbolic phase of the occupy movement but occupy has as a consequence in a way although i think it had to do this anyway it has moved out into the neighborhoods into the communities it is joining joining with community groups that are trying to reoccupy foreclosed houses. joined with insurgent longshoremen on the west coast it's going to join community struggles everywhere it's government joining with student struggles in response to the fact

the bald and awesome fact that one sort of generation of students after another is graduating from college with you gets a no possibility of getting employment occupy will be there with the student protesters to as they try to rally against tuition increases and fee increases so what i believe. is that we are at the beginning of another mass protest movement in the united states. and what we all have to understand if we can understand it is that these protest movements have been the major corrective in american history. of business corporate excesses of the greed that is bred by

a capitalist society a capitalist political culture when it is not reined in by popular influence. i think it's a brilliant analysis it seems that you said you know two thousand and eight to those ninety thousand ten past and nothing happened but obama was elected and it seemed to you know correct me if you think i'm wrong but it seems like for the people who elected him anyway they thought this was a revolutionary moment he made a failed to deliver the revolution and then the tea party came along and those people not at the top not the dick armey but at the bottom they thought this was a rollercoaster moment and then occupy came along and now we've got a genuine revolutionary moment i'm curious your thoughts on that in the two minutes we have left what gives you the greatest hope of what wakes you up at night with the greatest fear about the future well i think obama would have been a better president in his first term. if this protest movement that we are

seeing had a rep to earlier. obama needed he needed f.d.r. had a you know been over in a way. yeah well no the hoovervilles yes but in a way obama had the misfortune to be elected at that point in a great recession when hoover was president and the great depression he is the better comparison is for the first term at least i hope the second term is different to that in the in the in the in the minute i'm sorry we're coming up on just a hard break here in the in the one minute that we have left what's your greatest hope in your words concern. my greatest hope is that occupy flourishes that at length arms with community groups with you have millions who are struggling

to regain some of what they lost and then we'll have to struggle to reform american institutions so that. travesty of the last thirty or forty years just not occur again and what is what my greatest fear. is that the movement will be stamped out that it will be crushed and without that movement i see no hope for the future of the united states by an extraordinary analysis professor francis fox proven thank you so very much for being here with us tonight that's it for the big picture tonight for more information or to see any segment of the show that you may have missed check out our website it's been dot com and don't forget democracy begins with you get out there and get active your it.

a fresh financial blow to the euro nine nations are downgrade it france and australia losing their top sending markets on the single currency plummeting. to near zero marks a year since the uprising which talk of its president and spearheaded the arab spring for the mood is mobbed by worrying signs that radical islam is gaining traction. and america's efforts in afghanistan get a bleak assessment and the cia reports which describes the situation as a stalemate undermining previous pentagon optimism in a decade long war.