tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-42729482722571569762024-03-12T22:28:54.147-07:00The Revolution Continues#Occupy is best understood as a political form of the incompatibility between the capitalism of a fascist/oligarchic regime and the people. Capitalism itself is no longer the problem or issue but rather Fascism/Oligarchy as an imperialistic ideology and mode of governance.NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03499454400310101800noreply@blogger.comBlogger210125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4272948272257156976.post-64023266484334519752016-09-22T22:00:00.000-07:002016-09-22T22:00:03.304-07:00If the Trans-Pacific Partnership becomes law corporate power trumps the Constitution and democracy <br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">People and the Planet Before Profits</span></h3>
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FREE TRADE Vs DEMOCRACY</h1>
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<strong style="font-family: Oswald, Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 40px; margin-bottom: 15px;"><span style="font-size: x-large;"><a href="http://itsoureconomy.us/2013/01/free-trade-vs-democracy/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">If the Trans-Pacific Partnership becomes law corporate power trumps the Constitution and democracy </a></span></strong></h2>
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By Cliff DuRand</div>
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<b><em>“In a global economy in which multinational corporations are no longer bound to any single country, they have gained a new kind of power over national governments that, by their nature, are confined by borders. Companies have created a new kind of marketplace in which governments compete with one another for investment, essentially undercutting in a fundamental way some of the familiar, potent, and until recently enduring foundations of sovereignty.” </em><br /><em>–David Rothkopf, former partner of Henry Kissinger and a Treasury Department official in the Clinton administration. Rothkopf, Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008), p. 117. Cited by Jeff Faux in The Servant Economy, p. 82.</em></b></div>
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For the last couple decades US foreign policy has become increasingly about trade policy. The US has become the world advocate of “free trade,” promoting it through trade agreements like NAFTA and other bi-lateral agreements as well as through global governance institutions it has sponsored such as IMF, World Bank and WTO. The US has promoted free trade for much the same reason Great Britain promoted it in the 19th century, viz. the economically strongest country in the world benefits from free trade. It is the weaker countries that seek tariff protection for their infant industries, protection from competition with cheaper and higher quality imports. That protection is what enabled the US to industrialize in the last half of the 19th century. But then when the US became economically strong enough to compete regionally and eventually globally, it became an advocate of free trade and demanded that others abandon protectionism.</div>
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The justification for free trade rests on the theory of comparative advantage. This is the view that if countries trade free of government impediments, the market will tend to direct each to export that which they can produce most efficiently and import what can be produced more efficiently and thus more cheaply elsewhere. The invisible hand of the market will guide each to specialize in producing what they have a comparative advantage in. Thus a rational production and trading system will emerge that maximizes efficiency.</div>
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Free trade agreements like NAFTA were sold to the US public by appealing to consumer’s interest in having access to cheaper goods imported from Mexico. What was deliberately soft pedaled was their interest as workers in having jobs. Organized labor opposed NAFTA, fearing it would pit US workers in competition with low wage Mexican workers. Independent presidential candidate Ross Perot warned of “a giant sucking sound” as jobs would be off-shored to Mexico. But the Clinton administration said US exports to Mexico would create new jobs. And so, ignoring opposition from its traditional base in the unions, new Democrat Clinton pushed ratification of NAFTA through the Senate as his first priority. Perot proved to be correct as US companies shifted production to low wage Mexico – until even lower wage Chinese workers were brought into play when China joined WTO. But Clinton was also right as cheaper consumer goods from abroad filled the shelves of Wal-Mart with bargains welcomed by US workers who found their wages reduced. Free trade proved to be a mixed blessing.</div>
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But there is one important point about free trade that is often overlooked. We are not talking just about the free, frictionless movement of goods and services across borders, unrestricted by tariffs, quotas and regulations. We are also talking about the free movement of capital as corporations are freed to invest abroad. In fact, it is that mobility of investment capital that is of utmost importance, with profound economic consequences as well as consequences for democracy. It is the latter that I want to focus on today.</div>
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Unable to find sufficiently profitable venues for investment in the overdeveloped US economy, large corporations have increasingly moved abroad. They sought not just new outlets to sell their commodities, but low wage workforces that would decrease their production costs and thus boost their profits. Frequently that would involve locating different stages of the productive process in different countries so as to take optimal advantage of local conditions. The assembly lines of US industry were disaggregated and disbursed across the globe.</div>
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What emerged were global assembly lines. Such global production chains have become a signature feature of contemporary capitalism. Components may be manufactured in Singapore, transported to China for subassembly and then shipped to Mexico for final assembly before sale in the United States. What we have here is a global assembly line presided over by transnational corporations. Although such assembly lines are geographically dispersed, they overcome the limitations of the fixed assembly lines of the Fordist era in that they no longer have to rely on a fixed labor force that can organize itself to effectively claim a share of the surplus they create. Instead, the global assembly line gives capital the flexibility to seek out the lowest wage workforce and friendliest business environment available anywhere in the world. This has been made possible by the development of a global computerized network of instant communications via satellite. That and the computerization of banking have made money transfers and the movement of capital both easy and instantaneous. The communications network also allows the decentralization of technological development and design. Technicians can work at points distant from the processes of production to which they address themselves. And the entire process can be coordinated by management located anywhere on the globe. The limitations of space and time have been overcome by digital communications and cheap energy for transporting goods to their ultimate consumers.</div>
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For such globalized production to be possible, capital must be mobile, flowing freely across national borders. And at the same time products have to be able to move with minimum friction across those borders, unhampered by tariffs or quotas or nonuniform standards. In other words, there must be free trade in order for transnational capital to optimize accumulation. [the previous two paragraphs are quoted from Recreating Democracy in a Globalized State, p. 14]</div>
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But transnational corporations need more than just unfettered access to low wage, compliant workforces. They also need legal protection of their investments. They need protection from expropriation of their assets, laws and governments that can ensure their property is secure. And so a vital part of free trade agreements is protection of what are called investor rights. But this involves more than just protection from out and out expropriation, as often happens with revolutions. It also involves protection from governmental actions that might reduce the value of their property or potential profits by environmental and health regulations, labor laws or other such measures even though they might be for the public good. What in US law is called “regulatory takings” are seen as tantamount to expropriation.</div>
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When such governmental actions do occur, free trade treaties give the foreign corporation the recourse to sue. But that suit is not adjudicated in a national court, but by a transnational body of experts operating in secret. States are expected to enforce its decisions on their own nation’s taxpayers and consumers. This is a privileging of investor rights (i.e. the interests of transnational corporations) over the democratic rights of a nation. Let me give you some concrete examples.</div>
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The first arose under Chapter 11 of NAFTA. Several years ago oil companies started adding the chemical MTBE to gasoline to make it burn cleaner so as to cut down on air pollution. But it turned out that MTBE began to show up in ground water and it was discovered that it causes cancer. Now the water supply of many California cities is contaminated, as is also Lake Tahoe, once one of the purest bodies of water in the world. So the State of California decided to ban MTBE. But as it happened, this chemical is manufactured by a Canadian company called Methanex. Methanex proceeded to sue California for $970 million for the loss of anticipated profits. Under the free trade rules of NAFTA, Methanex claimed the state had interfered in its market and thus it was entitled to be compensated for its loss. Here we see government being discouraged from protecting the public health and well being unless it is willing to pay a private corporation for not harming it. Such an outcome would likely have enraged public opinion in the US So after much delay, the NAFTA court ruled that since the Canadian company made only a component in MTBE, it thus did not have a substantial enough interest for its claim. The court took the politically safer route by dodging the substantive issue.</div>
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Here’s another example. In 1996 the State of Massachusetts passed a law preventing state agencies from buying goods or services from companies that do business with Myanmar, a.k.a. Burma. This was because of the repressive military junta that rules that country after annulling the election of Nobel Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi as president. However, this selective purchasing law was challenged as in violation of WTO rules that require governments to not intervene into economic markets. As a spokesman for the EU said, “we don’t believe this kind of action is fair to the trade and investment community.”37 Under the banner of “free trade” the citizens of Massachusetts are forbidden from making democratic decisions about how to spend their collective money. Morality is required to leave the market alone. Under this principle, the sanctions against apartheid South Africa would have been forbidden and Nelson Mandela might still be in prison today. [the previous two paragraphs are quoted from Recreating Democracy in a Globalized State, p. 87]</div>
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There are many other examples. In 2011 the Canadian province of Quebec placed a moratorium on the controversial practice of fracking in order to study the environmental risks involved. A corporation chartered in Delaware had mining permits in the Saint Lawrence valley that were suspended. Although the company, Lone Pine Resources, Inc., was headquartered in Calgary, it was a foreign corporation. Thus under NAFTA’s Chapter 11, it is suing the Canadian government $250 million for lost profits. Such “investor-to-state” cases are litigated in special arbitration bodies of the World Bank and the United Nations, which are closed to public participation, observation and input. They have the power to award unlimited amounts of taxpayer dollars to corporations whose rights to make a profit they judge have been violated. By latest count, some 450 investor-to-state cases have been filed against 89 governments by transnational corporations who have been awarded $700 million to date.</div>
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And that is just the beginning. Now there is a new free trade agreement being secretly negotiated called the Trans-Pacific Partnership, TPP. It has been described as NAFTA on steroids by those who have seen some of its leaked provisions. Negotiations began under the Bush administration and the Obama administration is continuing them in hopes to complete the agreement this year. The discussions include trade representatives of U.S. and Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, Malaysia and Vietnam. Countries like Japan and China may join later. But the public, Members of Congress, journalists, and civil society are excluded. Not even Congressional committees have been able to see the draft text, but 600 corporate advisors have!</div>
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Some sections have been leaked. And what they reveal is “an agreement that actually formalizes the priority of corporate power over government,” according to Lori Wallach of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch http://www.citizen.org/trade . Only 5 of the 29 chapters have to do with trade. Wallach says the rest of the draft “include[s] new rights for the big pharmaceutical companies to expand, to raise medical prices, expand monopoly patents, limits on Internet freedom, penalties for inadvertent noncommercial copying, sending something to a friend. There are the same rules that promote off-shoring of jobs that were in NAFTA that are more robust that literally give privileges and protections if you leave. There is a ban on “buy American” and “buy local” or “green” or sweat-free procurement. There are limits on domestic financial stability regulations. There are limits on imported food safety standards and product standards. There are limits on how we can regulate energy towards a more green future – all of these things are what they call “Behind the Borders” agenda. And the operating clause of TPP is: “Each country shall ensure the conformity of its domestic laws, regulations and administrative procedures with these agreements.” That’s to say, that we’re told to conform all of our domestics laws – including all the important public interest laws fought so hard by people around the country – for these corporate dictates and it’s strongly enforceable. If we do not conform our laws, another country can challenge us and impose trade sanctions until we do, but this one is even privately enforceable by the corporations themselves.” [http://www.btlonline.org/2013/seg/130111af-btl-wallach.html ]</div>
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So you can see, free trade is about more than trade. It is about privileging corporations over the democratic rights of citizens and the sovereignty of nations. As the former Director-General of the WTO, Renato Ruggiero, said in 1995, “We are no longer writing the rules of interaction among separate national economies. We are writing the constitution of a single global economy.” [quoted by Jeff Faux, The Global Class War (John Wiley, 2006), p. 155.] What is being created is a global governance order in which corporation are the citizens, not flesh and blood humans like you and me. With free trade, corporations are making an end run around democracy.</div>
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For nearly 40 years now, since the mid 1970s, we have experienced a growing offensive by the corporations to roll back the popular gains of the New Deal era and the 1960s. Democracy has been the target of a class war to restore the class power of capital. And there has been weak resistance, at best, by the popular classes. But the stakes have become increasingly clear to more and more. Indeed, on the issue of free trade, there is now a broad public sentiment against this aspect of the corporate offensive. A major NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll from September of 2010 revealed that “the impact of trade and outsourcing is one of the only issues on which Americans of different classes, occupations and political persuasions agree,” with 86% saying that outsourcing jobs by U.S. companies to poor countries was “a top cause of our economic woes,” with 69% thinking that “free trade agreements between the United States and other countries cost the U.S. jobs.” Only 17% of Americans in 2010 felt that “free trade agreements” benefit the U.S., compared to 28% in 2007. [reported by Andrew Gavin Marshall ]</div>
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When TPP comes before the Senate for ratification sometime this year, we will have a major opportunity to rally this broad sentiment against free trade and strike a blow for democracy. Remember, if we fail, as a treaty the TPP will become the highest law of the land and the corporatocracy will have trumped the US Constitution once again.</div>
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<em>Cliff DuRand is a Research Associate at the Center for Global Justice. He is co-author and co-editor of <a href="http://www.claritypress.com/DuRand.html" style="color: #509bcb; outline: none !important; text-decoration: none; transition: all 0.2s linear;">Recreating Democracy in a Globalized State</a> (Clarity Press, 2012).</em> <em id="__mceDel">global.justice.cliff@gmail.com</em></div>
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NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03499454400310101800noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4272948272257156976.post-12794031275328838122016-09-22T14:55:00.000-07:002016-09-22T14:55:04.310-07:00Why Today’s Neoliberal Global Order Is Incompatible With Democracy<br />
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<a href="http://inthesetimes.com/" style="font-size: xx-large;">In These Times</a></h2>
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<span style="font-size: small;">With Liberty and Justice for all</span></h2>
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The transnational capitalist class thesis has been caricaturized by some critics as suggesting that contradictions between nation-states have disappeared into a global class-against-class scenario. Harris takes on this idea directly and with a level of detail that, on those grounds alone, makes his work a must-read book. (Darren Johnson/ Flickr)</div>
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WEB ONLY / FEATURES » SEPTEMBER 20, 2016</h5>
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Why Today’s Neoliberal Global Order Is Incompatible With Democracy</h1>
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A new book by Jerry Harris explores the transformation of global capitalism and its implications.</div>
<span class="author" style="border: 0px; color: #415d78; display: block; font-family: franklin-gothic-urw; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-weight: 700; letter-spacing: 1px; line-height: 14px; margin: 5px 0px 3px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-transform: uppercase; vertical-align: baseline;">BY <a href="http://inthesetimes.com/community/profile/6958" style="border: 0px; color: #415d78; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; transition: all 0.2s; vertical-align: baseline;">BILL FLETCHER, JR.</a></span><br />
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In the years since the Cold War and the collapse of the USSR, the U.S. Left has sensed that something was morphing within global capitalism. This “something” was described more by its symptoms than by its essence, e.g., deindustrialization. In much of the rest of the world there was a growing awareness, however, that a particular form of capitalism was becoming dominant on a world scale, a form that came to be known as neoliberal capitalism or neoliberal globalization.</div>
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Jerry Harris offers his book, <a href="http://www.claritypress.com/Harris.html" style="border: 0px; color: #425d77; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s; vertical-align: baseline;"><em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Democracy</em></a>, as an instrument to better understand this transformation of global capitalism and its implications. Most of the book is devoted to helping the reader better grasp what Harris argues is the historical transition—underway—from capitalism centered around the nation-state to global capitalism. This work is successful, enlightening and engrossing. In the final two chapters, however, Harris shifts gears, laying the basis for a problem that I’ll discuss below.</div>
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The thrust of Harris’s argument is that since World War II, but especially since the late 1960s/1970s, capitalism, which as a system is always in need of expansion, has been evolving in such a manner that it transcends national borders. Contrary to theorists, such as the late Ellen Meiksins Wood, this is not a return to the era of high-level trade that marked the pre-1914 capitalist world (what some theorists have described as an earlier globalization). Rather, it is the emergence of an unprecedented interpenetration of capital on a global stage.</div>
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And with this interpenetration we start to see, over the last several decades, the rise of what has come to be termed as a “transnational capitalist class.” This class, as the name implies, is not rooted in one country but has assumed an identity that goes beyond specific nation-states. As Harris make clear, this does not mean that the nation-state no longer holds any importance—which is the thrust of the argument offered by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in their famous work, <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Empire</em>—but that the role has shifted significantly, to a great extent servicing and serving the needs of the transnational capitalist class.</div>
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This analysis clashes with more traditional arguments on the Left but it speaks to matters that the traditional analyses have been unable to explain fully. A case in point was the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. At the time of the 2003 invasion, much of the Left and the progressive anti-war movement argued that this was an effort, in effect, to recolonize Iraq under U.S. domination and seize its oil. In the aftermath of the invasion, however, something odd happened. Occupation forces opened Iraq up for business to global capitalism rather than reserve it for the United States alone.</div>
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The transnational capitalist class thesis has been caricaturized by some critics as suggesting that contradictions between nation-states have disappeared into a global class-against-class scenario. Harris takes on this idea directly and with a level of detail that, on those grounds alone, makes his work a must-read book.</div>
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Harris lays out his case in describing the development of global capitalism and the transnational capitalist class in the first three chapters. In chapters 4 and 5, he offers a marvelous examination of two concrete situations: Ukraine and China. With regard to Ukraine, Harris digs behind the headlines and looks at the class forces on both sides, the relationship that they have with capitalist class forces in other parts of the world, historic nation-state tensions and the wild card of right-wing populism and neo-fascism that is infecting both Russia and Ukraine. He examines the interrelationship of these forces in a situation—and world—that is undergoing a transition. And therein lies the key to understanding the transnational capitalist class thesis: It speaks to a phenomenon that is emerging and transitioning, rather than a phenomenon that is fully and totally developed.</div>
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Harris’ examination of contemporary China is just as illuminating and satisfying. Again, he examines the connections that the Chinese capitalists have developed with others in the transnational capitalist class, including the role of the Chinese State—ironically led by a party that calls itself “Communist”—in the integration of the Chinese economy into the larger global capitalist economy. Harris, along with other theoreticians of this school, argues that many—though not all—of the contradictions we are witnessing between China and the United States are a reflection of the efforts by Chinese capitalists, and their allies, to alter the terms under which global capitalism operates. In other words, the conflict is not a competition between traditional empires but, analogically, disputes within a gang.</div>
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Harris offers his book as both an analysis of the growth of neoliberal globalization and a cautionary note on the dangerous road that it has placed before humanity. Perhaps it is for that reason that his final two chapters examine alternatives to neoliberal globalization, including both failed alternatives as well as sources of hope. The problem is that this comes across as two different books. While it was clear that Harris was trying to get the readers to consider how to struggle against global capitalism and its tendency towards authoritarianism and barbarism, there was a missing transition.</div>
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Harris might also have been more successful had he integrated into his discussion a deeper analysis of the rise of right-wing populism (including but not limited to neo-fascism) in the context of neoliberal globalization. After all, right-wing populism posits itself as THE alternative strategy of neoliberal globalization. While Harris acknowledges right-wing populism at various points in the book, he tends to merge it a bit too quickly with other segments of the Right, including into what the theoretician Nicos Poulantzas referenced as “authoritarian statism” and what I have described as “neoliberal authoritarianism.” Drawing from Poulantzas, I would distinguish the movement towards authoritarianism by the so-called democratic capitalist state as not identical with the rise of right-wing populism, though the two tendencies can and do overlap.</div>
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Despite the abrupt transition, Harris’s discussion of alternatives is useful, though a bit of a distraction. In fact, I would argue that he should further develop his thinking on alternatives in a separate volume. And I would further argue that a deeper examination of right-wing populism in the context of neoliberal globalization deserves to be addressed by adherents to the so-called global capitalism school in order to flesh out their analysis.</div>
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<em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Democracy</em> is an exceptionally thorough and thought-provoking work. Very rarely, these days, do I use a highlighter when reading a book in order to remind myself of facts, points of interest or points of difference. In this case, the highlighter was with me till the end, with my knowing that I will return to this book as a resource for better understanding, as well as explaining, the development of global capitalism and its implications for the billions of people on this planet ravaged by it.</div>
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BILL FLETCHER, JR.</h2>
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<span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Bill Fletcher, Jr.</span> is the author of <i style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">"They're Bankrupting Us!": And 20 Other Myths about Unions</i> and co-author of <i style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path toward Social Justice</i>. He is a talk show host, writer and activist. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook and at www.billfletcherjr.com.</div>
<br />NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03499454400310101800noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4272948272257156976.post-46772560190093670092016-09-22T14:37:00.000-07:002016-09-22T14:37:42.850-07:00Five years later, it’s worth looking more closely at what Occupy built.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><a href="http://inthesetimes.com/features/occupy-legacy-five-year-anniversary-mayday.html" target="_blank">Occupy Didn’t Just “Change the Conversation.” It Laid the Foundation for a New Era of Radical Protest.</a></span></h2>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><a href="http://inthesetimes.com/features/occupy-legacy-five-year-anniversary-mayday.html" target="_blank">Five years later, it’s worth looking more closely at what Occupy built.</a></span></h2>
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<b><a class="byline-link" href="http://inthesetimes.com/community/profile/322361">By Jesse Myerson</a></b></div>
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OCTOBER ISSUE | September 17, 2016</div>
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That, of course, was before hundreds of demonstrators descended and built an encampment to protest the power of the 1%. By September 24th, when video of a New York City police officer pepper-spraying members of Occupy Wall Street garnered national attention, the newly rechristened Liberty Plaza Park had become home to a welcome booth, a kitchen, a childcare zone, an arts and culture area, medical and legal teams, a media-production center and a library.</div>
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These all emerged through improvisation, the active ingredient in Occupy. From its founders’ initial act to the proliferation of encampments nationwide, the movement unfolded mainly by way of intuition, experimentation, accident, luck and emergency.</div>
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That emergency intensified as police soon cracked down on the nascent movement, evicting encampment after encampment. In the blink of an eye, the state tore down most of Occupy’s visible achievements, leaving the public with the impression that it had failed to build anything lasting or useful.</div>
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And yet, five years later, Occupy is widely credited with making inequality a political priority—which, in turn, made possible the landmark presidential run of a 74-year-old socialist—as well as touching off a new era of raucous protest and civil disobedience.</div>
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If this seems like a big footprint for a failed movement, it’s worth looking more closely at what Occupiers built—and continue to build—that lived outside the parks. Occupy did indeed “change the conversation,” popularizing the “99%” formulation that reintroduced class into the political narrative. But just as significantly, it resulted in the construction of lasting movement infrastructure—communications networks, physical spaces available to organizers and models for training and analysis. While this kind of infrastructure is often overlooked or undervalued, it’s critical to a movement’s growth and lasting impact. Arriving on the scene at a low point of the American Left, Occupy scrambled to cobble together the structures that might have sustained it—but one of its most important legacies was that it gave subsequent movements something to build and improve upon.</div>
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STARTING FROM SCRATCH</div>
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When Occupy kicked off in 2011, it had little to draw from in terms of institutions, political parties, publications, communications networks or gathering spaces. The counter-globalization struggle of a dozen years prior, as well as the anti-war effort from the mid-2000s, had left behind bits and pieces of tools and support systems for social movements. Labor groups including the Communications Workers of America, the United Steelworkers and National Nurses United endorsed the movement, and a number of union locals and individual members stepped in to provide material support. But by and large, OWS lacked any of the infrastructure of a significant political Left to support it.</div>
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Without tools and spaces crucial for facilitating strategic movement building, Occupy never stood much of a chance of coalescing into a powerful political formation.</div>
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Still, the new movement was a welcome change from the anemic shows of protest and dissent many organizers had grown accustomed to in preceding years. Yotam Marom recalls that while he was involved in socialist organizing prior to Occupy, public demonstrations and activism had “always felt small, always felt scrawny, always felt like a sideshow. I would invite my friends to these actions and secretly hope they wouldn’t come, because it was a little embarrassing.”</div>
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Then, one day in Zuccotti Park, “the conditions were right, the right people were there at the right time, there was a little bit of magic dust and the shit just popped,” he says.</div>
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New people were arriving every hour. Often, they had never led anything; some had never done any activism. A well-functioning operation, says Marom, would have identified the natural leaders among them and ushered them through a process of leadership development. But no such process existed.</div>
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“We pretended we were a leaderless movement,” Marom laments. As a consequence, not only were new leaders developed by the sink-or-swim method, “the leaders who did emerge were not held accountable. It made us less collective and democratic, not more.”</div>
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The question of leadership continued to dog Occupy. But after the parks were emptied, this realization led Marom and a handful of other likeminded comrades to found the Wildfire Project, which has facilitated strategic planning, political education and leadership development with the leaders of a number of movements that emerged in Occupy’s wake.</div>
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Since the project launched in early 2013, Wildfire has worked with the Florida-based, youth-led black freedom organization the Dream Defenders, the Fossil Fuel Student Divestment Network, anti-foreclosure organizers Occupy Our Homes, and several others, aiming to equip activists responding to a crisis with “the tools and skills to do that work in their day-to-day.”</div>
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Wildfire covers basic skills including public speaking and how to have one-on-one organizing conversations. But the group’s process also draws on many of the lessons learned by Occupiers—for example, not to suppress conflict. “In other strategic planning processes, the idea is to table the emotional/political/interpersonal stuff and to get to the ‘work,’” explains Marom. With Wildfire, on the other hand, “we actually dive head-first into conflict. We’re trying, as much as possible, to teach people to be in conflict in a generative way, as a way to get to being able to fight over strategy.”</div>
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At the same time, Wildfire works to challenge the antipathy towards leadership that pervaded Occupy. “A lot of it has to do with fear of the enemy, with the resignation that we’re never going to win anyway,” says Marom. As a culture within the broader Left, he believes it’s “a barrier to building a powerful and strategic movement.”</div>
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THE NEW RULES FOR RADICALS</div>
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While Occupy’s decentralized model presented barriers, it also provided a powerful draw for those fed up with politics as usual.</div>
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In the run-up to Occupy, for example, Tammy Shapiro had been considering quitting organizing. Non-profits that operated according to a tailored political script, tightly controlling every aspect of a campaign’s messaging and development, seemed to be the only game in town.</div>
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“I was really repelled by the way funding and money controlled both Washington politics and the work of nonprofits,” recalls the former organizer for J Street U, a Jewish-American youth group that organizes against Israel’s Occupation. “I noticed that no matter what, wealthy donors had more of a voice than the grassroots.”</div>
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The initial success of Occupy Wall Street allowed Shapiro “to see the power of this different way of organizing,” she says. The occupation’s decentralized style, which left plenty of room for grassroots experimentation, provided a paradigm that made sense to her, and brought her back to the profession she’d been trying to leave.</div>
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She got involved in InterOccupy, a collective that facilitated communications between Occupy groups around the country. That consisted of various tools: websites, social media and online conference call technology that allowed Occupiers in different cities to simulate physical meeting space—dividing callers into discrete breakout groups, establishing a speakers queue and managing elections in which participants can dial to vote.</div>
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With this communication network in place, it was possible for InterOccupy to compile regular newsletters alerting recipients to challenges occupations were encountering, solutions they were devising, actions they were planning and so forth—all without assigning a hierarchy. It suggested to Shapiro “the potential of what decentralization could do.”</div>
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A year later, she saw an opportunity to put this model into action in a new way, even when many of her compatriots were pronouncing Occupy Wall Street dead. “There’s this latent network,” she remembers insisting at an October 2012 retreat in upstate New York where Occupiers discussed the state of the movement. “I don’t believe it’s dead.” That intuition was put to the test immediately: “We came back from Blue Mountain and the hurricane hit the next day.”</div>
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Occupy Sandy was the movement’s redemptive second act. Not only did it revive the networks that had formed a year earlier, its relative efficacy put to shame the haphazard efforts mounted by FEMA, the Red Cross and various other more traditional, hierarchical agencies that bungled the complicated relief effort. “Where FEMA Fell Short, Occupy Sandy Was There,” read a November 2012 <em>New York Times </em>headline.</div>
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“Occupy Sandy confirmed to me and a lot of other people in New York that we were doing things in a way that worked,” Shapiro says. “The way that we were organizing had a lot of potential to get real results.”</div>
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Still, trying to convey the potential of decentralization to people who had not been involved in Occupy Wall Street or Sandy proved difficult. “We had a basic intuitive understanding, but we didn’t have language, we didn’t have models,” notes Shapiro. “We didn’t have the <em>Rules for Radicals</em> for the networked social movement age.”</div>
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Without being able to clearly articulate Occupy’s organizing model, it would be hard to identify its weaknesses and improve them. Shapiro and some like-minded organizers formed the “think-make-and-do-tank” Movement Netlab (MNL) to change that.</div>
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Through one project, it has tried to detail the various roles participants take on in a mass, decentralized movement. For instances, a movement requires coaches, culture-makers, introducers and so on. Through another, it has charted the life cycle of a movement. MNL hypothesizes that movements are made up of distinct “moments:” First public anger grows over an ongoing crisis. Then, a trigger event incites a spontaneous mass response, which begins a “heroic” expansion phase and honeymoon period, when anything seems possible. When this ends, the movement goes through a painful contraction, and lastly through a period of reflection and evolution. Then the cycle begins again—with the difference that the movement, hopefully, has won some concrete gains and is even better prepared to take advantage of the next peak.</div>
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Shapiro and MNL’s work with the climate justice movement put into practice some of their hypotheses about how mass, decentralized movements can organize effectively for a common purpose. During the preparation for the 2014 People’s Climate March, for example, Shapiro built out a communications system that riffed off of InterOccupy’s structure, providing each of over 100 hubs (Labor for Climate, Arts for Climate, Yoga Teachers…) with a website, Facebook and Google group—“connected but separate online front doors.”</div>
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This allowed people to enter from a community that they felt deeply a part of, so they could bring their particular identities into the larger movement, rather than leaving them at the door. Moreover, it enabled groups who may sometimes be at odds—say, labor unions and anti-fracking groups—to organize autonomously for the march with messaging specific to their constituencies.</div>
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OCCUPYING ELECTORAL POLITICS</div>
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Winnie Wong, who had also been involved in Occupy Sandy, had another idea of how to put decentralized networks to work. She had seen how adept they had proven at providing relief to hurricane victims, and found herself wondering how they might fare at waging explicit politics.</div>
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“I wanted to do something much more strategic and tactical around Occupying the whole of the Democratic Party, which I believe to be complicit in all of these really harmful policies.”</div>
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That led to People for Bernie, which memorably coined the catchphrase “Feel the Bern.” “We organize like a working group,” says Wong of the 8 to 10 core members. “We give each other permission to act autonomously on behalf of the collective.” When disagreements arise (“They very rarely do,” she maintains) about whether something is appropriate to post, they are resolved with deliberate haste in a group Facebook chat. “I credit Occupy with teaching me de-escalation.”</div>
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The group actually launched in 2014 as “Ready for Warren.” Its mission involved “building electoral power for people who identify with the core issues and the core messaging that came out of Occupy Wall Street,” says Wong. “We made Elizabeth Warren the figurehead of the 99%.” It wasn’t long before prominent liberal organizations signed onto the call (ultimately unheeded) for Warren to challenge Hillary Clinton in the 2016 primary.</div>
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In April 2015, Wong says, “We were the first to pivot to Bernie Sanders, long before the other groups endorsed him.” People for Bernie originated with an open letter bearing the names of a number of organizers from Zuccotti Park and other Occupations, who signed on in support of Sanders, as individual occupiers. (Disclosure: the author is a signatory.)</div>
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Simultaneously, the group launched a website and, approximating the structure favored by Tammy Shapiro and InterOccupy, more than fifty “...For Bernie” Facebook groups and Twitter accounts, “which basically became the formation of a large, decentralized tent for people across the country to get under.”</div>
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“We gave away all the passwords to so many constituencies,” Wong says. “We knew that we couldn’t be the people responsible for creating the messaging, we needed the people to create the messaging. We needed people to talk about their issues.”</div>
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While there are no plans to change the floating signifier from “Bernie” to something else just yet, there is some room for that to happen. “It was never about electing Bernie Sanders,” says Wong. “It was about creating a movement.”</div>
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Most importantly, the network People for Bernie has assembled remains ready for re-activation when the right moment hits.</div>
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OCCUPYING FOR ABOLITION</div>
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This summer, a new wave of encampments swept the nation. From Decolonize LA to Chicago’s Freedom Square to New York’s Abolition Square, activists once again built ongoing protest sites, this time to call to for an end to racist policing and mass incarceration.</div>
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These protests emerged directly out of the Black Lives Matter movement, and in some cases cited the encampments set up during 2014 protests in Ferguson as immediate inspiration. But infrastructure built in the wake of Occupy also provided important support.</div>
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The planning meetings for Abolition Square, located just blocks from Zuccotti Park, took place at the May Day Space, housed in an Episcopal church in northern Bushwick, Brooklyn. The collective directing the project is largely made up of Occupiers who remember all too well how the movement flagged when it lacked a permanent home. Previously, it inhabited a much larger space, elsewhere in Bushwick, which hosted grassroots activist and movement group meetings, forums, parties and more.</div>
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“Our mission is to facilitate space for social justice organizing groups,” says Sandra Nurse, an Occupy veteran and member of the May Day collective. “It’s specifically built for groups to feel welcome at any time of the day, as needed.” With May Day, groups doing vital organizing don’t have to resort to meeting rooms at the odd hours of their convenience, or public spaces where police can surveil and harass members.</div>
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Five years ago, Occupy Chicago suffered keenly from a lack of space—mass arrests prevented a permanent encampment from ever being established. Chicago’s Freedom Square thus managed to do what Occupy Chicago did not: occupy. Organizers with the #LetUsBreathe collective transformed what was once an unkempt vacant lot on the city’s west side for 41 days, setting up tents across from an alleged police black site at Homan Square. In addition to calling for the site to be shut down, #LetUsBreathe envisioned Freedom Square as a space that “imagines a world without police” and as a “community block party.” Organizers have since ended their occupation and turned the space over to the surrounding community.</div>
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One of the key organizational differences between Occupy and Black Lives Matter, believes Shapiro, is that the latter has been intentionally inclusive of pillar organizations with formal leadership structures. In doing so BLM has largely avoided the fetishization of leaderless-ness that had so frustrated Yotam Marom in Zuccotti Park—a fetish that only developed, says Shapiro, “because we didn’t have the kind of framework that we’ve been working out at MNL.”</div>
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“You need a lot of distributed leadership in a decentralized network, but there’s still leadership,” she says.</div>
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This and other lessons have brought the Left to a very different place than it was in five years ago. “The biggest gain from [Occupy] was the sense of possibility that people took from that moment. We had never had any expectation that we would be big or powerful, and that has catastrophic consequences,” says Yotam Marom. Now, organizers “actually believe that a movement is possible, and it changes everything about the way they work.” <img src="http://inthesetimes.com/features/images/end.gif" style="border: 0px;" /></div>
NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03499454400310101800noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4272948272257156976.post-11463569002665913092016-09-13T12:35:00.001-07:002016-09-13T12:48:01.969-07:00 Do We Really Need a Third Party?<img alt="Dissident Voice: a radical newsletter in the struggle for peace and social justice" src="http://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/themes/dissident/images/header.jpg" /><br />
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<b><span style="font-size: x-large;">Do We Really Need a Third Party?</span></b></h2>
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by Robert P. Abele / September 12th, 2016</div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">The frustration that prompted the “Bernie or Bust” movement is not just about economic stagnation. Rather, it is more basic, more institutional-centered, than that. From the viewpoint of progressives, there is in addition a frustration with the once liberal, now neoliberal political philosophy and its supporters, many of whom hold political office. This includes the presidential candidacy of Hillary Clinton. For many voters from the left, liberals have become institutional custodians: they are, to use a Marxist term, “bourgeois liberals,” or, as Chomsky refers to them, the “liberal intelligentsia,” whose primary task is to protect institutional processes, structures, and interests, over all other norms and goals. Those who have taken it as their task to tend to institutional mandates and goals seek to marginalize and minimize all ideas coming from outside the institution by delegitimizing them in comparison with the goals and procedures of institutional structures, and using those structures to slow them down and/or send them to institutional black holes. These institutional guardians learn to minimize or lose the ideals they begin with, by submitting them to institutional processes whereby their moral values are streamlined, trimmed, and changed in their function, form, and normative ends. In this essay, “institution” means “government,” but it could apply to any institution, such as academia, the media, Democratic Party, or business.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Such bourgeois liberals are opposed by the visionaries, who frequently today self-reference as “progressives. They are the challengers to institutional prerogatives and functions, who are aware that institutional curators do not understand the language of morality, but rather comprehend pragmatism over values, the protection of the institutions of which they are a part, and even self-interest within the confines of the institution.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">An excellent example of this dialectic can be seen in the heated debate that occurred between former Congressman Barney Frank and Cornel West, on the July 26 edition of the show “Real Time with Bill Maher.” While West argued that the issues that confront us, such as climate change and deep inequality, require revolutionary and immediate change, Frank argued that such a vision not only did not cohere with an institutional arrangement (i.e. American government) that prefers “slow as you go” and “institutional change only” [my summary phrases, not quotations from Frank], but that institutional procedures regarding specific issues were the<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>only</i><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>way to make changes in people’s lives. Mr. Frank even devalued Jill Stein’s candidacy for President on the basis of her lack of making<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>institutionally-approved</i><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>changes in her political career! Even more, Frank’s listing of Democratic—and specifically Bill Clinton—programs that were successful for citizens ignored that they were moderate gains at best, and clearly offset by Democrat—and Clinton—programs that were at odds with equality and improvement for all. For just one example, the Clinton demolition of the welfare system kept their institutional (corporate) masters happy and kept Bill in office, while completely betraying the interests of a large segment of the populace. Other examples abound.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">A bit to the political right of these “institutional liberals” are institutional conservatives such as the Karl Rove type. The difference between Karl Rove’s conservativism and a liberal, with regard to institution-caretaking and power distribution, is that Rove seeks to determine and present people “their” vision for their activism (through propaganda), thus “allowing” the political leaders to “follow” by “capitulating to the will of the people” and thus manipulating the system through its current configurations and structures in order to obtain the ends of power sought by the propagandists to begin with. Liberals within the system advocate for and seek to “allow the system to work,” while simultaneously eschewing the vision of the activists pushing for deep systemic changes, and also to a degree using propaganda to slow the people’s push for change so that it doesn’t leave the control of the institutional wardens—i.e. liberal defenders of institutional processes and prerogatives see to it that the people don’t “get out of the control” of the system’s defenders. This was clearly seen in the tensions between the Sanders and Clinton supporters during the Democratic Convention.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Contrary to the Party liberals who currently control the DNC, progressives seek to consolidate the vision of the people outside of the system (i.e. the “grassroots”) into an overall mandate for<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>systemic</i><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>change itself, the vision of which cannot be comprehended and bound by systemic and institutional concerns. This is where the value and role of a third party comes into play: to unify progressive voices into a whole both by analysis of institutional problems and by designing and promoting activist programs intended to change institutional abuses and lethargy regarding moral values, especially values of human dignity and equality.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">One appropriate method of such institutional analysis is to point out those (factual) institutional structures which lead to or entail contradictions in practice or in the stated ends of the institution. This is the empirical, and specifically the Marxist or socialist model of analysis.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">The other method is normative: to point out that the intrinsic or adopted structural procedures are at cross-purposes with the principle of the primacy of human good or dignity by engaging in immoral ends and/or means. I maintain that the more comprehensive analysis is the normative approach, since we are, from rudimentary perceptual cognition to abstract thinking,<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>normative</i><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>beings,<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>and<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></i>because no analysis is complete, even in empirical method, without presupposing certain norms to be legitimate and assumed for analysis purposes (e.g. “equality” in socialism; “contradiction” in Marxist analysis, etc.). Hence, institutional structures and practices which violate<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>essentially</i><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>normative conditions, concomitantly violate our humanity to the degree that they ignore or eschew distinctly normative concerns. In essence, Sanders’ resonance with voters struck this normative chord with issues such as “equality,” “breaking up the big banks,” and “breaking down the power of Wall Street.”</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Therefore,<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>realpolitik</i><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>is the model of action<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>inside</i><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>the institution itself as well as between institutions, but it is<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>outside</i><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>of it that the main source of moral limitations to institutions originates, in the women and men who have not compromised nor surrendered their voice of conscience to the sources and means of institutional power by “following institutional processes and procedures,” thus maintaining the status quo, while only tinkering around the edges of the institution from within and in crafting appearances of movement forward, all the while maintaining the same processes and values called forth by the institutional dictates that necessitated the moral push from the outside to begin with.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">If the people “outside” fail to set moral limits and pressure institutional members with those limits, the institution will deepen its corruption and its power over its people, by succumbing to whatever forces exist that can and will fill the vacuum left by the withdrawal of the moral limits from outside (usually power and wealth).</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Those within the institution who do have any conscience, limit and nuance its voice when they become players in and thus components of institutional structures, processes, and mandates. Hence, the ongoing need for a unified external moral voice, not yet another (“third”) party seeking to get into an institutional system that will ultimately either force the party and its members into significant moral compromise or destroy the morality of the party that propelled them into the institution to begin with. The trail of justice is littered with the corpses of those who, with full moral conscience, entered into the institution to attempt to change it.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Thus, while in this election cycle a third party choice would seem to be an obvious need, it should seek to represent not a genuine alternative for taking the reins of institutional power, but rather should serve as a statement of a unified moral vote against the status quo; a message to those within the institutional halls that they are not safe in their comfortable roles as institutional tenders and servicers if they do not heed the distinctly moral voice of the outsiders, the citizens.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">If the institution continues to fail to listen to the clear moral voice of the people outside it, then the<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>casus belli</i><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>for revolt against it has already been clearly and directly given to the people. But as argued here, the revolt will not succeed by sticking a third party into a corrupt institution, but by using the third party to push those in the institution to listen to the voice of institutional change, or be removed. It threatens the neoliberals with political extinction in the face of the threat of human extinction from climate change, and from the immoral policies of neoliberal and Republican economic and social elitism. It tells the world that the people are prepared to “go it alone” and to take on the institution more directly if need be in the process, in order to preserve and protect humanity and to bring about a more equitable society in the face of the extreme imbalances we see today, both in the world and in the halls of institutional power. This is the duty of the citizens of any republic, and third parties can help citizens perform those duties by uniting their voices.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">So, yes, we need a third party, but not to play the role that people frequently think. Rather, the role of a third party will be to alter the breadth, role, function, and process of the institution itself, to force those who service the institution to serve instead, or primarily, the people they pretend to serve, but to whom they perform that service minimally or not at all. Such change never comes from those within the institution itself. So, most importantly, the surest way to end a third party revolution is to put the party into an institution whose power is already absolute and whose corruption is complete. A third party’s function is rather to lead the way to an overturning and revamping of power structures that is far overdue. This is not something a simple movement within an institutional party could or would accomplish. Revolutions are not done from within a system, and are not done in one election season, nor under the leadership of those whose primary allegiance is to their institutional position and party. Such leaders surrender to the institution quickly, as we have seen with both Obama and Sanders. Change can only come through a people unified in their vision, yet with the knowledge that they are not only outsiders to the system, but also know that the degree to which institutional parties and corruption are entrenched in the system imply proportionally the amount of time it will take to batter down the institutional walls in order to open its doors to the people. Third parties lead the way in this by helping everyone to get their hands on the battering ram of the moral vision of human dignity and equality that will bring fear to the entrenched parties and their corrupt bosses, as their secured institutional walls and doors begin to quake from the force of the people.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">If change is what people want, third parties are the only way to get it, and the winning attitude is not to expect to put third party people in office. When people like Barney Frank and others, especially Democrats, say of Jill Stein “but she can’t win,”<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>they are expressing the fact that they have already capitulated to the institutional system as it is</i>. The<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>right</i><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>attitude is that “win or not, we’re demanding change, and we’re not leaving until we get it.” That is the attitude of those who participate in third parties. That is the attitude that over time cannot lose.</span></span></div>
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Dr. Robert Abele (www.spotlightonfreedom.com) holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Marquette University and M.A. degrees in Theology and Divinity. He is a professor of philosophy at Diablo Valley College, in California in the San Francisco Bay area. He is the author of four books, including A User's Guide to the USA PATRIOT Act, and The Anatomy of a Deception: A Logical and Ethical Analysis of the Decision to Invade Iraq, along with numerous articles. His new book, Reason and Justice, is forthcoming (2018).<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><a href="http://dissidentvoice.org/author/robertp-abele/" style="color: #333333; text-decoration: underline;">Read other articles by Robert P.</a>.</div>
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This article was posted on Monday, September 12th, 2016 at 6:25pm and is filed under<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><a href="http://dissidentvoice.org/category/third-party/" rel="category tag" style="color: #333333; text-decoration: underline;">"Third" Party</a>,<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><a href="http://dissidentvoice.org/category/democrats/" rel="category tag" style="color: #333333; text-decoration: underline;">Democrats</a>,<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><a href="http://dissidentvoice.org/category/elections/" rel="category tag" style="color: #333333; text-decoration: underline;">Elections</a>,<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><a href="http://dissidentvoice.org/category/right-wing-jerks/" rel="category tag" style="color: #333333; text-decoration: underline;">Right Wing Jerks</a>.</div>
NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03499454400310101800noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4272948272257156976.post-1061163435519235032016-08-17T07:08:00.000-07:002016-08-17T07:15:34.182-07:00The Revolution of Consciousness<h2>
<span style="font-size: x-large;">The Huffington Post</span></h2>
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<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marianne-williamson/the-revolution-of-conscio_b_5574514.html" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: x-large;">The Revolution of Consciousness</span></a></h2>
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<span class="timestamp__date--published" style="box-sizing: inherit;">07/10/2014 01:05 pm ET</span> | <span class="timestamp__date--modified" style="box-sizing: inherit;"><strong style="box-sizing: inherit;">Updated</strong> Sep 09, 2014</span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "notonashkarabic" , "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , "roboto" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-weight: bold;">Marianne Williamson</span><br />
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<span style="color: white; font-size: large;">There is a revolution occurring in the world today, but it is not fought with armies and it does not aim to kill. It is a revolution of consciousness.</span><br />
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<span style="color: white; font-size: large;">This revolution is to the 21st century what the Scientific Revolution was to the 20th. The Scientific Revolution revealed objective, discernable laws of external phenomena and applied those laws to the material world. The Consciousness Revolution reveals objective, discernable laws of internal phenomena and applies them to the world as well. </span><br />
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<span style="color: white; font-size: large;">The Scientific Revolution improved the state of humanity in many ways, but it also fostered a worldview neither ultimately helpful nor deeply humane. That worldview is mechanistic and rationalistic, without the slightest bow to the primacy of consciousness. Yet consciousness supplies moral vision and ethical purpose, without which all the science in the world won’t keep us from destroying ourselves or the planet on which we live.</span><br />
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<span style="color: white; font-size: large;">Gone with irony and deep sigh any lingering hope that science will cure all the ills of the world. Certainly science has improved and continues to improve the world in significant, even stunning ways. But despite all its amazing gifts, science cannot give us what we most need now. It cannot save us from ourselves. Science can lead to the cure of a physical ailment, but it is not just a physical ailment that needs healing. Humanity’s core problem is not material but spiritual. It is our insanity — our inhumanity toward each other — from which we need to be delivered, in order to save us from the self-destruction on which we seem so bent. </span><br />
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<span style="color: white; font-size: large;">Science itself is placed at the behest of human purposes. It can be used for good and it can be used for evil. Of itself, it is neutral and thus amoral. It should not therefore be our god. It’s time to end our strict obeisance to its dictates that the laws of the material world are fixed and unalterable, unchanged by the powers of consciousness. The old Newtonian model of world as machine has in fact given way to the realization that the universe is not a big machine, so much as it is, in the words of British physicist James Jeans, “a big thought.” Science itself has begun to recognize the power of the mind, but not so a lot of the world it has mesmerized over the last hundred years.</span><br />
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<span style="color: white; font-size: large;">We need to heal our thinking, in order to heal our world.</span><br />
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<span style="color: white; font-size: large;">The Law of Cause and Effect holds true on every level of reality. Thought is the level of Cause and material manifestation is the level of Effect. Change only on the level of effect is not fundamental change it at all, yet change on the level of cause changes everything. That is why a revolution in consciousness is our greatest hope for the future of the world. </span><br />
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<span style="color: white; font-size: large;">What is the Revolution of Consciousness, in a nutshell? Like all great movements in human history, it is based on a single insight: in this case, that we are not separate from one another. We are not material beings limited to the physical body, but beings of consciousness limited by nothing. Like waves in the ocean or sunbeams to the sun, there is actually nowhere where one of us stops and another one starts. On the level of bodies, we’re all separate of course. But on the level of consciousness, we are one.</span><br />
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<span style="color: white; font-size: large;">What that means, of course, is that what I do to you, I do to myself. That makes the Golden Rule very, very good advice. Do unto others what you would have others do unto you — because they will, or someone else will.</span><br />
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<span style="color: white; font-size: large;">In the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one, affects all indirectly.” That understanding is not metaphor or symbol; it’s a description of an ultimate Reality shoved from our awareness by an obsolete scientific worldview. To reclaim that understanding is not blind but visionary. King was not just a movement leader but also a spiritual one, proclaiming that the human condition would not fundamentally change until our hearts were changed. Until that change occurs within us, every time we cut off the head of a monster three more will take its place.</span><br />
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<span style="color: white; font-size: large;">Anything we do to anyone else will ultimately come back at us, whether as individuals or as nations. Once we know that, we cannot un-know it. It changes everything, including our hearts. How can we not change how we see each other, once we realize that we <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">are</em> each other? </span><br />
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<span style="color: white; font-size: large;">In the words of President John F. Kennedy, “Those who make peaceful evolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable.” The revolution of consciousness paves the way for the peaceful evolution of the human race. The alternative to that evolution is catastrophic and impenetrable darkness. </span><br />
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<span style="color: white; font-size: large;">Any species, if its behavior becomes maladaptive for its own survival, either mutates or goes extinct. What arrogance it would be to believe that that applies to every species but our own. In fact, humanity’s behavior is in fact maladaptive for our own survival: we fight too much with too many weapons of mass destruction existing on the planet, and are actively destroying our own habitat. Our choice is clear: we will either mutate or we will die.</span><br />
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<span style="color: white; font-size: large;">The mind does not want to hear this, but the heart rejoices in it. The dictates of science aren’t so sure about it, but the dictates of consciousness are clear. Humanity doesn’t need to make another machine; it needs to make another choice. We need to consider the possibility of another way, another option, another path for the human race to follow...one in which we do not bow before the laws of science, but rather bow before the laws of love. The mind will no longer be our master, but our servant. Science will no longer be a false god, but a truer help. And humanity will evolve, peace at last will come to earth, and war will be no more.</span></div>
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<em style="box-sizing: inherit;"><span style="color: white; font-size: large;">Marianne Williamson is a best-selling author and lecturer www.marianne.com</span></em></div>
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NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03499454400310101800noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4272948272257156976.post-33673779970809848602016-07-05T18:27:00.000-07:002016-07-05T18:37:36.831-07:00Anonymous – Ideas Are Social Evolution<br />
<img alt="Anonymous Official Website - Anonymous News, Videos, Operations, and more | AnonOfficial.com" class="mh-header-image" src="http://anonofficial.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/anonymous-site-header.png" height="106" width="640" /><br />
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<a href="http://anonofficial.com/anonymous-ideas-are-social-evolution/" target="_blank">Anonymous – Ideas Are Social Evolution</a></h1>
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<b><span style="color: white;">There’s an entire universe of people out there, countless others spreading ideas of a positive future.</span></b></span></div>
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<b><span style="background-color: black; color: white;">You might call them dreamers, or crazy. You might say that what they are doing is never gonna work, and that we are doomed to fall back to our primal instincts. Ladies and Gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, I am here to tell you differently.</span></b></div>
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<b><span style="background-color: black; color: white;">I know, we live in an age with daunting problems. We need the best ideas possible, we need them now, we need them to spread fast. The common good is a meme that was overwhelmed by the seductive mirage of blind profit and intellectual property. But it needs to spread again. If the meme prospers, our laws, our norms, our society, they all transform.</span></b></div>
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<b><span style="background-color: black; color: white;">This is social evolution! And it’s not up to governments, it’s not up to corporations, it’s not up to lawyers… it’s up to us!</span></b></div>
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<b><span style="background-color: black; color: white;">We are the children of a thousand generations of this human race. We have come this far not to be subjected to imperialism, conflicts, and deprivation. We are meant for something great. I am here to tell you that with the right mind and motivation, we can achieve anything. We have the technology to feed everyone on earth. We can escape the prison of working for survival. And we can find a balance with nature. We can do all this and much, but only if we want to.</span></b></div>
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<b><span style="background-color: black; color: white;">And now, go do something amazing.</span></b></div>
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<b style="background-color: black;">Anonymous – Ideas Are Social Evolution</b></div>
NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03499454400310101800noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4272948272257156976.post-56207970124069694422016-05-30T18:07:00.000-07:002016-05-30T18:10:15.195-07:00Oligarchy is the new Fascism<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><a href="http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/9/15/1017214/-" target="_blank">Oligarchy is the new Fascism</a></span></h2>
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<span class="author-name" data-original-title="" data-placement="right" data-toggle="mini-profile" data-user-id="202328" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: bold;" title=""><a href="http://www.dailykos.com/user/MinistryOfTruth" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #ea7106; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: none;">By MinistryOfTruth</a> </span> </div>
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<span class="timestamp " data-epoch-time="1316116623000" data-localize-time="" data-time-format="%A %b %d, %Y" data-time-zone="-0400" style="box-sizing: border-box;">Thursday Sep 15, 2011</span> <span class="time-dot" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 7px; margin-left: 2px; margin-right: 2px; position: relative; top: -1px;">·</span> <span class="timestamp " data-epoch-time="1316116623000" data-localize-time="" data-time-format="%l:%M %p %Z" data-time-zone="-0400" style="box-sizing: border-box;">3:57 PM EDT</span></div>
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When the super rich can break laws and face zero consequences because they have bribed the politicians and law enforces then we don't have a Democracy under the rule of law. We have an oligarchy for the super rich and a fake rigged democracy.</div>
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Through a legalized system of bribery, politicians receive bribes from wealthy donors in return for writing the laws to their liking, and then those politicians are rewarded with high paying jobs when they retire. To not call this bribery is a lie, but in a system based on lies, lying is a necessity.</div>
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They lie us into wars for profit.</div>
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They lies us into believing that our founding fathers wanted a free market, when in fact our founding fathers believed so much in a regulated marketplace with clearly defined rules and regulations that they put it in the constitution, which is that peace of paper Conservative fascists wave at you when they are taking your Democracy away from you.</div>
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And yes, I am going to call "conservatives" fascists in this post, because the people who cheer the death of their fellow citizens aren't good Americans. They aren't good Christians either. If you hate the poor and wish death upon the sick, you aren't a Christian, you're a Roman. If you believe in torture and the death sentence I don't understand how you reconcile the torture and death penalty imposed upon Jesus, but more importantly to my point, if you believe in small democracy and a limited democracy that subservient to the wealthy and business interests alone, you don't believe in democracy, you believe in Oligarchy.</div>
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But what is Oligarchy other than fascism with a different name?</div>
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The idea of "Free Markets" is a direct assault on the central idea behind Democracy. The idea that Democracy via Government has no place in Governing the commerce conducted within the state is a method of thwarting democracy. If one wealthy Oligarch can have his will over the combined will of millions of his fellow citizens than he is not their peer, he is their King.</div>
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We have an Oligarchy in America, that can not be disputed. There are billionaires who control multi-billion dollar industries who exert enormous wealth and power, and they are the bribe makers, they are the men who bribe our law makers and law enforcers to subvert our democracy to their interests, and not only have they succeeded, but they have declared a silent, coded all out war on the heart of American Democracy itself.</div>
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Coded language such "economic freedom" means the freedom of the rich to do as they please and the freedom for the victims of their robbery to die in the streets. "Social Justice" can only become the enemy of economic freedom when the basis of that economic freedom is fraudulent, that is why the bribe taking lawmakers hate "Social Justice", because social justice means an end to the "Economic Freedom" to commit their fraud and do as they please.</div>
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What conservative fascists call "Socialism" is anything that stands in the way of their undemocratic "Free Markets". <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Duckspeak</em> was the word used by George Orwell in 1984 to describe the dumbing down of language into a incomprehensible system of relaying talking points to the brain that fitted perfectly within party approved discussion. When I hear conservative fascists speak the same talking points ad verbatim in a mishmosh of disconnected lunacy, <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Duckspeak</em> is what I am hearing.</div>
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<span style="color: blue; font-size: large;">...What was required, above all for political purposes, was short clipped words of unmistakable meaning which could be uttered rapidly and which roused the minimum of echoes in the speaker’s mind. The words of the B vocabulary even gained in force from the fact that nearly all of them were very much alike. Almost invariably these words — goodthink, Minipax, prolefeed, sexcrime, joycamp, Ingsoc, bellyfeel, thinkpol, and countless others — were words of two or three syllables, with the stress distributed equally between the first syllable and the last. The use of them encouraged a gabbling style of speech, at once staccato and monotonous. And this was exactly what was aimed at. The intention was to make speech, and especially speech on any subject not ideologically neutral, as nearly as possible independent of consciousness. For the purposes of everyday life it was no doubt necessary, or sometimes necessary, to reflect before speaking, but a Party member called upon to make a political or ethical judgement should be able to spray forth the correct opinions as automatically as a machine gun spraying forth bullets. His training fitted him to do this, the language gave him an almost foolproof instrument, and the texture of the words, with their harsh sound and a certain wilful ugliness which was in accord with the spirit of Ingsoc, assisted the process still further.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-size: large;">So did the fact of having very few words to choose from. Relative to our own, the Newspeak vocabulary was tiny, and new ways of reducing it were constantly being devised. Newspeak, indeed, differed from most all other languages in that its vocabulary grew smaller instead of larger every year. Each reduction was a gain, since the smaller the area of choice, the smaller the temptation to take thought. Ultimately it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from the larynx without involving the higher brain centres at all. This aim was frankly admitted in the Newspeak word duckspeak, meaning "to quack like a duck". Like various other words in the B vocabulary, duckspeak was ambivalent in meaning. Provided that the opinions which were quacked out were orthodox ones, it implied nothing but praise, and when the Times referred to one of the orators of the Party as a doubleplusgood duckspeaker it was paying a warm and valued compliment.</span></div>
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<a href="http://www.orwelltoday.com/duckspeak.shtml" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: blue; font-size: large;">http://www.orwelltoday.com/...</span></a></div>
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Words like <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">tyranny, spending, taxes, regulation, socialism</em> and many others have been rendered meaningless over decades of conservative fascist propaganda in an effort to make the basic use and methods of democracy seem evil. This distracts from the fraud and exploitation inherit in "Free Markets" and the bribery of lawmakers and law enforcers that allows the fraud to exist. Every single conspiracy theory has one thread in common, the Government is evil. Never is the conspiracy a conspiracy of greed or wealth, it is never evil corporations or billionaires, it is always evil governments and faceless government bureaucrats or specific lawmakers who won't be bribed or aren't doing exactly what the bribe making Oligarchy demands.</div>
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The idea of small government and limited government is an attack on Democracy. Any use of Democracy that conservative fascists who have been bribed or duped disapprove of becomes an act of tyranny to them, and the acts of conservative fascists are always painted by the Oligarch propaganda media as a just an honorable act of rebellion. The fascist are always the victims in their own minds, they are the persecuted always, even if while they are taking your democratic rights away from you and feeding you to the fraudulent Oligarchs who manipulate the free markets.</div>
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In a fraud based economy the game is rigged in favor of the lawless. The super rich who profit from this fraud use their profits to bribe our law makers and law enforcers.</div>
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In a bribe based system of representative Democracy, the game is rigged in favor of the bribe takers. The bribe takers who profit from this fraud use their power to aid and abet the fraudulent super rich.</div>
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And at the end of the game both the super rich and the bribed lawmakers and law enforcers get richer and more powerful while everyone else in our society is screwed.</div>
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We used to have a system in America where some persons were considered to be the outright property of other people, and were exploited as such. Now we have a system where the property of one man is considered to have all the same rights as a person. In an unfettered, unregulated free market, that property is a king that never dies and you are all his slaves unless you are one of the owners of that property, and then you are of the economic royalty and everyone else who is not of that select economic royalty is a peasant. Free markets is the new slavery to a corporate personhood, never ending war is the new pathway to peace, and Oligarchy is the new fascism.</div>
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Now prove me wrong. Talk me down. The floor is yours.</div>
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NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03499454400310101800noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4272948272257156976.post-17079423627577726652016-05-07T01:05:00.000-07:002016-05-07T01:09:13.058-07:00Bernie, We Will Follow You Anywhere. Except to Hillary.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">Armory of the Revolution</span></h2>
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<a href="https://armoryoftherevolution.wordpress.com/2016/04/22/why-hillary-is-not-an-option-for-sanders-voters/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Bernie, We Will Follow You Anywhere. Except to Hillary.</a></h1>
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<a class="author" href="https://armoryoftherevolution.wordpress.com/author/armoryoftherevolution/" rel="author" style="border: 0px; color: #3a3a3a; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: 600; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Roland Vincent</a> / <a class="entry-date" href="https://armoryoftherevolution.wordpress.com/2016/04/22/why-hillary-is-not-an-option-for-sanders-voters/" style="border: 0px; color: #aaaaaa; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">April 22, 2016</a></div>
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<a href="https://armoryoftherevolution.files.wordpress.com/2016/04/berniesanders.jpg" style="border: 0px; color: #117bb8; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><img alt="Democratic presidential candidate, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., speaks during a town hall meeting at Nashua Community College in Nashua, N.H., Saturday, June 27, 2015. (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer)" class="size-full wp-image-4463" height="445" src="https://armoryoftherevolution.files.wordpress.com/2016/04/berniesanders.jpg?w=700&h=445" style="border: 0px; height: auto; max-width: 100%;" width="700" /></a></div>
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<span style="border: 0px; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: medium; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Bernie Sanders may be the most important political figure since Abraham Lincoln, even if he is not elected president, even if he doesn’t become the Democratic nominee.</span></span></div>
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<span style="border: 0px; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: medium; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Bernie Sanders has ignited a political revolution. It will continue long after Sanders is dead and buried and will reshape the American political landscape for decades to come.</span></span></div>
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<span style="border: 0px; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: medium; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">One has only to see Sanders’ popularity and support among young voters to appreciate how profoundly he will impact the country. Voters under thirty embrace Bernie in astounding numbers. Upwards of 80% of those young people support him. As they move into positions of influence and authority in society, the Democratic party as we know it cannot continue to exist.</span></span></div>
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<span style="border: 0px; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: medium; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Hillary Clinton is the last stand for Wall Street Democrats. She and the political hacks and opportunist whores who have controlled the party for the past 50 years are toast in a very few election cycles.</span></span></div>
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<span style="border: 0px; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: medium; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Millennials are taking over the party, the country, society.</span></span></div>
<div style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: medium; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The knee jerk fear of socialism does not affect them. The siren call of greed falls on deaf ears. Social justice and equality are not campaign slogans to them. Our young people are not impressed by incremental improvements in society. They are unwilling to allow their values and beliefs to be sacrificed on an altar of political expediency.</span></span></div>
<div style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: medium; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">They believe they are entitled to a government that works for everyone. They do not see their futures served by the status quo or gradualism.</span></span></div>
<div style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: medium; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Those young people are the future of the Democratic party. And that future will be significantly delayed if Hillary Clinton is elected president.</span></span></div>
<div style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: medium; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Bernie and his legions are fighting the status quo, the corrupt political system that auctions off legislation and governmental policies to the highest bidder. The system which makes officeholders more responsive to special interests and major donors than they are to the people who elect them.</span></span></div>
<div style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: medium; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Bernie and his team may believe that they must support Hillary if he does not defeat her for the nomination. He has certainly said he would. He may believe that he will be able to shape the future of the party and influence her policies as president. That is certainly the usual practice. All the good Democrats rally around the nominee and present a unified front to the electorate.</span></span></div>
<div style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: medium; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The problem with such an approach this year is that Bernie has exposed the political status quo for the fraud that it is. Bernie has raised issues that cannot be addressed by Hillary, as Hillary is the poster child for the very problems Bernie is describing.</span></span></div>
<div style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: medium; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Bernie may rationalize the problems away with concerns that the Republicans are so much worse than is Hillary, but that argument will not be persuasive to many who support Sanders.</span></span></div>
<div style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: medium; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">I will stand with Bernie for as long as he fights to be our president. I will support him in his quest for the Democratic nomination. I would encourage him to continue on through November as an independent or third party candidate. I urge him to turn his campaign organization into a long term shepherd and advocate of the political revolution he has started.</span></span></div>
<div style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: medium; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">I beg him not to fold. To not endorse Clinton. To not embrace the corrupt system he has been fighting.</span></span></div>
<div style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: medium; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">If Hillary Clinton is elected president, the revolution stops dead in its tracks.</span></span></div>
<div style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: medium; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">If Sanders endorses Clinton he will undo much of what he has accomplished.</span></span></div>
<div style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: medium; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">He will almost certainly rip the hearts out of those who have come to love, respect, and admire him.</span></span></div>
<div style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: medium; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The revolution will be put on hold until such time as we can take back the Democratic party, possibly four or eight years from now.</span></span></div>
<div style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: medium; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">And those years will continue to yield dead American troops, seniors without housing, students with crushing debt, families without healthcare, American jobs being outsourced, Wall Street running amok, industry lobbyists and alums in her administration, billions dumped into Israel’s coffers, arms sales to the world, neocon foreign policies reminiscent of W and Dick Cheney. And on. And on.</span></span></div>
<div style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: medium; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">If Bernie does embrace Hillary, many of his troops will not.</span></span></div>
<div style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: medium; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Bernie, we love you.</span></span></div>
<div style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: medium; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">But we won’t follow you into the enemy’s camp.</span></span></div>
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<span style="border: 0px; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: medium; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Your place in history has yet to be decided.</span></span></div>
<div style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: medium; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">You can be a Democratic has-been. Or you can be the most important political figure since Abraham Lincoln.</span></span></div>
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<span style="border: 0px; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: medium; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Personally, I think you are Lincoln-esque.</span></span></div>
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<strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Author’s Notes:</strong></div>
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•<strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"> I am unaware of any other blog with the Armory’s mission of radicalizing the animal movement.</strong> I certainly hope I am not alone, and that there are similar sentiments being expressed by comrades unknown to me.</div>
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<strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">If you know of other blogs dedicated to animal rights and the defeat of capitalism, please comment with a link.</strong></div>
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• Be sure to follow the Armory and share it with your Facebook friends and email contacts, as well as on Twitter, Google, and all other social media platforms. Our influence and effectiveness is dependent upon you!</div>
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NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03499454400310101800noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4272948272257156976.post-74777283229443506762016-04-29T20:21:00.000-07:002016-04-29T20:21:23.185-07:00The Other Political Challengers Taking on the Democratic Establishment<img class="header_logo" height="20px" src="http://inthesetimes.com/features/images/itt-logo.png" /><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">THE OTHER PROGRESSIVE CHALLENGERS TAKING ON THE DEMOCRATIC ESTABLISHMENT</span></center>
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<span class="byline" style="color: #595959; font-family: franklin-gothic-urw; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-weight: 700; line-height: 15px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-top: 10px; text-transform: uppercase;"><a class="byline-link" href="http://inthesetimes.com/community/profile/321700" style="color: #595959; font-stretch: normal; text-decoration: none;">BY CHRISTOPHER HASS</a></span></center>
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<span class="section_lede" style="font-family: franklin-gothic-urw-comp, sans-serif; font-size: 24px; font-weight: 700; line-height: 20px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-top: 10px; text-transform: uppercase;">“TODAY,” BERNIE SANDERS BOOMS IN HIS MONOTONE SHOUT,</span> “we begin a political revolution to transform our country—economically, politically, socially and environmentally.” He marks each beat with his right hand, as if conducting with an invisible baton. Behind him, a lone seagull flaps its wings as it flies across Lake Champlain. The crowd of 5,000 that has come to Burlington, Vt., on a sunny afternoon in May to witness Sanders’ official campaign announcement breaks into a cheer.</div>
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At the time, it was easy to dismiss talk of revolution as the rallying cry of a 74-year-old democratic socialist who clings too dearly to memories of the 1960s. Eleven months and more than six million votes later, Sanders’ call for revolution is harder to ignore.</div>
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But what, exactly, would this political revolution look like? It’s not hard to imagine Sanders marching in the streets with the masses—he’s walked plenty of picket lines, most recently alongside Verizon workers in New York City last October—but that’s not the revolution he’s calling for. For Sanders, political revolution means shifting control of American politics away from corporate interests, convincing non-voters to go to the polls and attracting white working-class voters back to the Democratic Party, all while moving the party left enough to embrace democratic socialist policies.</div>
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A political revolution of that kind is going to require two things: a wave of candidates committed to a bold set of progressive ideas and a mass of voters with the political will to elect them. There’s evidence both of these are already here.</div>
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<span class="section_lede" style="font-family: franklin-gothic-urw-comp, sans-serif; font-size: 24px; font-weight: 700; line-height: 20px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-top: 10px; text-transform: uppercase;"><em>IN THESE TIMES</em> SPOKE TO U.S. HOUSE AND SENATE CHALLENGERS</span> across the country who are very much a part of this wave. They are all outsiders to varying degrees, and all of them are running against the Democratic establishment in its various forms—from corporate donors and super PACs to the head of the Democratic National Committee herself.</div>
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These challengers range from first-time candidates to experienced lawmakers, from community organizers to law professors. Each is balancing the individual concerns of the voters they seek to represent alongside the larger mood of the nation. None of them is running <em>because</em> of Bernie Sanders, but they clearly benefit from the enthusiasm and sense of progressive possibility his campaign has created.</div>
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It would be a mistake to call them “Sanders Democrats” (and it’s unlikely Sanders himself would want anything to do with the term). Some have endorsed Sanders, others remain neutral or even back Hillary Clinton. But they are coalescing around a set of progressive policies familiar to anyone who has heard Sanders speak, including single-payer healthcare, free college tuition, a $15 minimum wage and breaking up the big banks. It’s hard to imagine a Democratic platform more at odds with Bill Clinton’s centrist Third Way of the 1990s.</div>
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More importantly, these positions increasingly reflect the popular will. Even after the brutal battles over Obamacare, polls show that more than half of Americans support moving to a single-payer healthcare system. Fifty-eight percent want to break up the big banks. Sixty-three percent support raising the minimum wage to $15. And Americans are nearly united in agreement (78 percent) that Citizens United should be overturned.</div>
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What’s striking about recent polling, though, is not the support for these progressive policies (many have enjoyed widespread approval for a while), but the openness to new, radical ideas—especially among young voters. In a January YouGov poll, people under 30 rated socialism more favorably than capitalism. On the eve of the Iowa caucus, when asked how they describe themselves, 43 percent of Democratic caucusgoers chose “socialist.” Take a moment to let that sink in.</div>
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<span class="section_lede" style="font-family: franklin-gothic-urw-comp, sans-serif; font-size: 24px; font-weight: 700; line-height: 20px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-top: 10px; text-transform: uppercase;">THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU HAVE A GENERATION OF YOUNG PEOPLE</span> whose central experiences with capitalism have been two recessions, a financial crisis, crushing college debt, flat wages and soaring income inequality. For young people, the devil they don’t know is looking better and better than the devil they do—and that sentiment is fueling insurgent challengers.</div>
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Many of these candidates continually emphasize the need to purge U.S. politics of corporate money, starting with the Democratic Party.</div>
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“It’s easy for candidates to say they’re for overturning Citizens United, but it’s really meaningless when they’re also taking so much corporate and dark money that they’ll never follow through,” says <a href="http://inthesetimes.com/features/bernie_sanders_democrats_tim_canova.html" style="color: #1eaedb;" target="_blank">Tim Canova</a>, who is running for Congress in Florida’s 23rd congressional district. “The Democratic Party has lost its way. It has gone corporate and Wall Street on so many issues that it has unfortunately turned its back on its own grassroots base.”</div>
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And it’s more than a matter of principle: Many of these candidates believe that voters are fed up with how the corporate capture of the party has pulled it to the right. “The Democratic Party has been Lucy with the football and the voters have been Charlie Brown,” says <a href="http://inthesetimes.com/features/bernie_sanders_democrats_tom_fiegen.html" style="color: #1eaedb;" target="_blank">Tom Fiegen</a>, a candidate for Senate in Iowa. “Democrats have pulled the football away too many times, so the voters say, ‘Nope, I am not going to be tricked again. I am not going to have you lie to me and tell me you’re on my side, and then when I send you to D.C., you vote for the TPP or you vote for the Keystone Pipeline.’ ”</div>
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Nowhere is this trust gap felt more keenly than among young voters. Sanders has won the support of young people like few politicians before. In each of the 27 states that held primaries or caucuses in February or March, he won the youth vote, often by more than 50 points. In his home state of Vermont, he defeated Hillary Clinton among voters under 29 by an overwhelming 95 percent to 5 percent.</div>
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Tom Fiegen saw how this played out in Iowa. “In the conventions I went to,” he says, “there was probably 30 to 40 years difference in age between Bernie supporters in one half of the room and Hillary supporters in the other half of the room.” Fiegen himself has endorsed Sanders, and you can hear in his voice the same passion that has animated so many young people: “We are idealists. … We want a better world. We think we can achieve it. We’re willing to basically throw our bodies in front of the bus to do that.”</div>
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<span class="section_lede" style="font-family: franklin-gothic-urw-comp, sans-serif; font-size: 24px; font-weight: 700; line-height: 20px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-top: 10px; text-transform: uppercase;">IT WOULD BE A MISTAKE TO OVERLOOK THE FACT THAT THIS YEAR’S ELECTION</span> is playing out in a moment when protest movements have interjected themselves into the national conversation in a way we haven’t seen in a long time. Black Lives Matter, Fight for 15, the climate movement and more have demonstrated the value of setting uncompromising demands and pushing the boundaries of what is politically possible.</div>
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It’s no surprise then that some of these progressive challengers come directly out of protest movements. <a href="http://inthesetimes.com/features/bernie_sanders_democrats_pramila_jayapal.html" style="color: #1eaedb;" target="_blank">Pramila Jayapal</a>, a Washington state senator running for the 7th District seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, has a long history of activism and advocacy in Seattle. She founded the post-9/11 immigrant rights group Hate Free Zone (now OneAmerica), which has held massive voter registration drives.</div>
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“The only reason I got into politics was because I believed it was another platform for organizing,” she says, “and that’s what I want to do with my congressional campaign. We’ve brought in thousands of leaders, young people and people of color and women who never saw themselves as part of democracy.”</div>
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<a href="http://inthesetimes.com/features/bernie_sanders_democrats_joseline_pena-melnyk.html" style="color: #1eaedb;" target="_blank">Joseline Peña-Melnyk</a>, who is running for Congress in Maryland’s 4th District, says: “These movements give me hope for the future of our democracy. They show that the spirit that gave rise to the civil rights movement is still alive as people take up causes that matter and challenge the status quo.”</div>
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<a href="http://inthesetimes.com/features/bernie_sanders_democrats_donna_edwards.html" style="color: #1eaedb;" target="_blank">Donna Edwards</a>, a co-founder of the National Network to End Domestic Violence now running for Maryland’s open Senate seat, agrees. “I’ve always believed in outside movements,” she says. “Government doesn’t move effectively and elected officials don’t move effectively unless they have a big push from the outside.”</div>
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Candidates like Debbie Medina, a democratic socialist running for state Senate in New York’s 18th District, are happy to be that push. As she told <em>The Nation</em>, “This election is just another rent strike.”</div>
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Sanders himself is arguably the biggest protest candidate of them all. But a funny thing is happening: Many of the protest candidates are winning. By the middle of April, Sanders had won 16 states, as well as the Democrats abroad primary. Donna Edwards has led by as much as 6 points. Polls show Lucy Flores, a Sanders supporter running for Congress in Nevada, leading by 20 points. In Maryland’s 8th congressional district, <a href="http://inthesetimes.com/features/bernie_sanders_democrats_jamie_raskin.html" style="color: #1eaedb;" target="_blank">Jamie Raskin</a>’s two closest opponents are busy arguing over who’s in second place.</div>
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<span class="section_lede" style="font-family: franklin-gothic-urw-comp, sans-serif; font-size: 24px; font-weight: 700; line-height: 20px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-top: 10px; text-transform: uppercase;">THE ESTABLISHMENT, HOWEVER, IS NOT GOING QUIETLY.</span> In Florida, where Tim Canova is challenging Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz for her congressional seat, news got out in March that the Florida Democratic Party (FDP) had denied Canova’s campaign access to the party’s voter file. His supporters created an uproar; the file is crucial to any campaign’s get-out-the-vote efforts. The FDP eventually backed down in order to avoid, in the words of the state party executive director, the “appearance of favoritism,” but the policy remains in place for all other Democratic primary challengers in Florida. And not just Florida—Democratic challengers in other states are routinely denied access to this data or charged extra for it.</div>
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“The DNC and state Democratic parties must stop favoring incumbents over insurgents in Democratic primaries,” Canova says. “We need to recruit activists committed to our progressive agenda to run for office, and that includes challenging incumbent Democrats.”</div>
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Given that these candidates want to rid the party of corporate influence, it’s no surprise that many are going head-to-head with big money. In Maryland, Jamie Raskin’s two biggest challengers in the Democratic primary are a wine mogul named David Trone, who has already spent more than $5 million of his fortune on the race, and Kathleen Matthews, who once oversaw the Marriott political action committee and is now herself the recipient of more lobbyist money than any Democrat running for the House in 2016.</div>
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“My [two] major opponents here have no real history of involvement in Democratic Party politics,” Raskin says. “They are creatures of the big money politics that have overtaken our country.” He’s won the endorsement of both liberal groups and a number of Democratic state lawmakers, and—borrowing a page from Sanders’ playbook—has relied on a surge of small-dollar donations to remain competitive. “Progressives are fired up here for a victory against big money,” Raskin says.</div>
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In Nevada, <a href="http://inthesetimes.com/features/bernie_sanders_democrats_donna_edwards.html" style="color: #1eaedb;" target="_blank">Lucy Flores</a> faces a multi-millionaire, Susie Lee, who has loaned her own campaign $150,000. But as Jeb Bush will tell you, money alone only gets you so far, especially in a year when voters seem more interested in authenticity.</div>
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“The number one lesson that everyone can learn from Bernie Sanders,” Tom Fiegen says, “and that I’ve tried to emulate is: Tell the truth.” Donna Edwards put it this way: “We should not run away from who we are as Democrats and the values that we share. … We lose elections because our voters stay home.”</div>
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<span class="section_lede" style="font-family: franklin-gothic-urw-comp, sans-serif; font-size: 24px; font-weight: 700; line-height: 20px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-top: 10px; text-transform: uppercase;">FOR A PRESIDENT SANDERS OR A PRESIDENT CLINTON TO BE SUCCESSFUL,</span> they’re going to need voters to come out not just in November, but in 2018, 2020, and beyond. For any president to enact a progressive agenda, they’re going to need a new Congress, made up of people like Donna Edwards, Jamie Raskin, Pramila Jayapal and others.</div>
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When Barack Obama first ran for president, he spoke frequently about how his election was not about him, but us. He may have meant it, but it was hard to shake the feeling that at that moment in American history, it was in fact very much about him and the qualities he possessed. Today, when Sanders uses the same language, you believe him—if for no other reason than it’s hard to imagine a wild-haired septuagenarian in a baggy suit as the catalyst for a popular movement. Clearly, something deeper is going on.</div>
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For the most part, Sanders himself has remained focused on his own election fight with Hillary Clinton. He has avoided talk of the future. But in a recent interview with Cenk Uygur of the “Young Turks,” Sanders let his guard down for a minute, saying, “We need, win or lose for me, a political revolution which starts electing people who are accountable to the working families of this country.” There it was—“electing people,” plural, not a single president. That’s what revolution looks like. <img src="http://inthesetimes.com/features/images/end.gif" style="border: 0px;" /></div>
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NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03499454400310101800noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4272948272257156976.post-1436821013276784882016-04-27T18:17:00.000-07:002016-04-27T18:17:33.920-07:003 NEXT STEPS IN THE POLITICAL REVOLUTION - BERNIE SANDERS CAN'T DO IT ALONE.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: x-large;"><a href="http://inthesetimes.com/features/bernie_sanders_next_steps_political_revolution.html" target="_blank">3 NEXT STEPS IN THE POLITICAL REVOLUTION</a></span></b></center>
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<span style="font-family: franklin-gothic-urw-comp, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 24px; line-height: 20px; text-transform: uppercase;"><b><br /></b></span></span><span class="byline" style="color: #595959; font-family: franklin-gothic-urw; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-weight: 700; line-height: 15px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-top: 10px; text-transform: uppercase;"><a class="byline-link" href="http://inthesetimes.com/community/profile/322415" style="color: #595959; font-stretch: normal; text-decoration: none;">BY LARRY COHEN</a></span></center>
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What is that political revolution, beyond his call to get the billionaires and corporations out and the people in?</div>
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1. <a href="http://inthesetimes.com/features/bernie_sanders_next_steps_political_revolution.html#candidates" style="color: #1eaedb;">Electing candidates to public office like Sanders</a>—both this year and in years to come—is one leg.</div>
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2. The second leg is democratic, structural political reform. This means changes to our electoral system, such as instituting automatic voter registration and matching small donations with public funds.</div>
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3. It also means transforming the Democratic Party to a populist-based party by reforming its inner workings. Sanders’ campaign offers the most comprehensive challenge to the wealthy Democratic establishment since Jesse Jackson’s historic 1988 campaign. Sanders stumped that year for Jackson, helping him win in Vermont. At the 1988 Democratic convention in Atlanta, the Jackson campaign negotiated party reforms that included ending winner-take-all primaries and halving the number of super delegates. Partly as a result of the end of winner-take-all, Bernie is on track to win at least 500 more delegates than Jackson did in 1988. But the reforms to the super delegate system were never enacted, and the Sanders campaign (to which I am an adviser) plans to bring some version of that demand back this year. The delegate selection process will also be back on the table, based on a growing list of serious flaws beginning with the Iowa Caucus, where the Democrats refused to release or review the caucus precinct results.</div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 22px; line-height: 36px;">Twenty-three years before Occupy Wall Street, Jackson also pressured the Democrats to include a call for higher taxes on the 1% in the party’s platform. This and other platform demands pushed Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis in a more progressive direction. Today, as in 1988, issues are the third leg of the political revolution—and the most apparent. Clinton and Sanders hold clearly different positions on trade, foreign policy, financial reform (including breaking up the big banks), the role of money and super PACs in politics, and critical economic reforms such as free higher education, Medicare-for-all and Social Security expansion. These issues will not only be raised from now through July, but for years to come in mobilizations of the emerging progressive base.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 22px; line-height: 36px;">Those of us who are working day and night to elect Bernie Sanders president are determined to sustain this movement beyond the moment. The congressional and other electoral campaigns this year, combined with the emerging focus on democracy itself and the issues that mobilize our supporters, will carry that movement forward. </span><img src="http://inthesetimes.com/features/images/end.gif" style="border: 0px; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 22px; line-height: 36px;" /><br />
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NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03499454400310101800noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4272948272257156976.post-81111746117454176992016-04-17T18:20:00.000-07:002016-04-17T18:20:27.521-07:00Why Bernie Sanders is the only Populist Candidate for President<br />
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FRI, 4/24/2015 - BY <a href="http://www.occupy.com/author/carl-gibson" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; color: black;">CARL GIBSON</a></div>
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As Bernie Sanders stood politely next to the microphone at the Hanover, NH, home of Jon Fox and Darrell Hotchkiss, Fox, who was introducing Sanders, joked about how he offered Sanders a tie at an event in Burlington, Vt., when Sanders was still mayor.</div>
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“He absolutely wouldn’t let me give him the tie. He told me, ‘I hate those things,’” Fox said.</div>
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As the packed audience of dozens at Fox and Hotchkiss’s house stood captivated, Sen. Sanders asked a few rhetorical questions about the stark inequality between the haves and have-nots in today’s United States:</div>
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“How does it happen that despite a huge increase in technology and productivity, Americans are <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/06/speed-up-american-workers-long-hours" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; color: #0054a6; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">working longer hours for lower wages</a>?”</div>
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“Income for the median family is about <a href="http://www.insidesources.com/wheres-the-outrage-recent-income-and-poverty-numbers-show-little-improvement/" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; color: #0054a6; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">$5,000 less</a> than that same family earned in 1999. How does that happen? Why?”</div>
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“The top 14 people in America, between 2013 and 2015, saw a <a href="http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/mar/27/bernie-s/bernie-sanders-gop-budget-does-not-ask-ultra-wealt/" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; color: #0054a6; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">$157 billion increase</a> in their wealth. That’s more wealth in a two-year period than what the bottom 40 percent of American people have. Is this what the people want, or is this economy rigged completely in favor of the wealthy?"</div>
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The concentration of wealth among the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans has become such a pressing issue that even Republican presidential candidates as far to the right as Ted Cruz are acknowledging it, <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/republicans-are-suddenly-talking-about-income-inequality-2015-2" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; color: #0054a6; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">and on Fox News, of all places</a>. While Republicans continue to insist on policies that will only exacerbate inequality – like the GOP-led House recently voting to cut taxes by $269 billion <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/17/us/politics/house-votes-to-repeal-estate-tax.html?_r=0" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; color: #0054a6; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">for the 6,000 wealthiest families in America</a> – and Hillary Clinton <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/campaign-2016-hillary-clintons-fake-populism-is-a-hit-20150416?page=3" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; color: #0054a6; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">pays lip service</a> to the injustice of tax loopholes that allow wealthy hedge fund managers to pay laughably low tax rates, Bernie Sanders remains the only potential candidate proposing bold, definitive solutions to inequality.</div>
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At the New Hampshire event, Sanders called the current federal minimum hourly wage of $7.25 a “starvation wage” and called for it to be doubled to $15 an hour. He also drew attention to his legislation that would create <a href="http://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/sanders-introduces-bill-to-rebuild-americas-crumbling-infrastructure-support-13-million-jobs" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; color: #0054a6; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">13 million new jobs</a> by investing $1 trillion in updating America’s infrastructure.</div>
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As Clinton was bringing her nascent presidential campaign to the mainstream, Bernie got off the campaign trail and back in Washington this week where he <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/22/bernie-sanders-fast-track_n_7118242.html" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; color: #0054a6; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">employed an interesting filibuster</a> to a bill that would speed the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership through Congress without the public getting to hear its contents. While Sen. Sanders was bringing up a procedural motion to stop the Senate Finance Committee from meeting to discuss fast-track, he tag-teamed with Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) who has introduced over 80 amendments to the fast-track legislation, all of which will take hours to debate within committee.</div>
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In the meantime, Brown and Sanders are taking over the headlines to drum up public rage against fast-tracking the TPP – and getting what they hope are enough votes together to stop the bill in its tracks.</div>
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“It is not acceptable that probably until the last few days, major television networks spent zero time discussing the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which is the largest trade agreement in the history of our country,” Sanders said in New Hampshire last weekend.</div>
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Hillary Clinton, however, <a href="http://www.nationaljournal.com/politics/how-much-longer-can-hillary-clinton-go-without-a-firm-position-on-trade-20150422" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; color: #0054a6; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">continues to waffle on the TPP</a>. While she backed it as President Obama’s Secretary of State, she’s since kept mum about the trade deal – one that's remained so secretive that the only portions made available for public review were done so by <a href="https://wikileaks.org/tpp/" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; color: #0054a6; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">whistleblowers risking their entire careers</a>. The worst parts of the agreement allow multinational corporations to <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/26/business/trans-pacific-partnership-seen-as-door-for-foreign-suits-against-us.html" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; color: #0054a6; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">sue the U.S. government</a> over new laws that may infringe on future profits, effectively making American and other nations' sovereign laws subservient to global corporate rule.</div>
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Very soon, Hillary Clinton’s campaign will be dealing with the fallout of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Clinton-Cash-Foreign-Governments-Businesses/dp/0062369288" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; color: #0054a6; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">“Clinton Cash,”</a> a new book detailing the questionable ways in which the Clinton family built their wealth. Some examples include Hillary Clinton’s state department granting favors to foreign entities that made donations to the Clinton Foundation, and who paid Bill Clinton as much as $500,000 for each individual speaking engagement. Most notably, the book describes a Canadian bank and major stakeholder in the Keystone XL pipeline proposal that <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/20/us/politics/new-book-clinton-cash-questions-foreign-donations-to-foundation.html" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; color: #0054a6; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">paid former President Clinton $1 million</a>, right around the time Secretary Clinton’s State Department was considering the project.</div>
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During Sanders’s most recent stop in New Hampshire, he decried the influence of big money in politics as the key obstacle to legislation that would allow the economy to work for the vast majority of Americans. His call for overturning the Citizens United Supreme Court decision and instituting public financing of campaigns drew wild applause.</div>
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“We are not going to move forward in creating new jobs and dealing with the minimum wage, pay equity for women, climate change, Wall Street, all these issues, until we have real campaign finance reform,” Sanders said. “Buying elections is not free speech... It is just simply wrong for billionaires to spend unlimited amounts of money on elections.”</div>
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While Hillary Clinton has announced a goal of raising an astonishing <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-heffernan/why-does-hillary-need-25-_b_7056586.html" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; color: #0054a6; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">$2.5 billion</a> for her campaign, much of will likely come from the same corporations and banks that already own Washington, Sanders has continuously held fast to his promise of never accepting corporate money. A side-by-side comparison of Clinton’s and Sanders’s donors shows whose interests the candidates will serve if elected.</div>
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While four of <a href="http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/contrib.php?cycle=Career&type=I&cid=N00000019&newMem=N&recs=20" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; color: #0054a6; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Hillary’s top donors</a> are banks (over $1.5 million from Citigroup and Goldman Sachs; more than $1 million from JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley throughout Clinton’s political career), all of <a href="http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/contrib.php?cycle=Career&type=I&cid=N00000528&newMem=N&recs=20" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; color: #0054a6; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Sanders’s top 20 donors</a> are organizations representing working people. The largest cumulative amount Sanders has received throughout the entirety of his 17-year political career is $95,000 from the Machinists/Aerospace Workers Union. Other unions supporting Sanders represent public school teachers, letter carriers, electricians, and auto workers.</div>
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Though Republicans, mainstream Democratic politicians and the beltway pundit elite have channeled their inner Frank Underwood and falsely referred to earned Social Security benefits as <a href="http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/dc-s-worst-kept-budget-secret-lots-of-democrats-support-entitlement-cuts" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; color: #0054a6; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">“entitlements”</a> that need to be cut to ensure the program’s stability, Sanders has also made the bold stance of pledging to not only protect Social Security, but expand it. Clinton, on the other hand, remained largely silent during the infamous “Grand Bargain” debates in which President Obama <a href="http://www.salon.com/2013/10/03/gops_extortion_tactics_social_security_could_be_next_liberals_fear/" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; color: #0054a6; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">put cuts to Social Security on the table</a> in negotiations with Republicans. Her husband’s chief of staff, Erskine Bowles, co-authored the <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/12/04/11-shocking-true-facts-about-simpson-bowles/" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; color: #0054a6; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">austerity-laden Simpson-Bowles plan</a> that inspired Obama’s starting point for negotiations.</div>
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At the home of Jon Fox, Sanders told a story about a CEO from the Business Roundtable – one of the largest lobbying groups for multinational corporations in Washington -- speaking to the Senate Budget Committee, of which Sanders is the ranking member. The CEO urged committee members to eliminate all federal taxes for corporations while raising the age to qualify for Social Security and Medicare benefits to 70.</div>
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“We did some research, and we found out that the average CEO on the business roundtable, when they retire, will have about <a href="http://www.budget.senate.gov/democratic/public/index.cfm/2015/3/sanders-hits-business-roundtable-committee-for-responsible-deficit-for-targeting-seniors" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; color: #0054a6; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">$88,000 a month</a>,” Sanders said. “Can you imagine the chutzpah of a guy who gets a million dollars a year in retirement benefits, coming to the U.S. Congress saying we have to cut Social Security and cut Medicare for people trying to get by on $13,000, $14,000 a year?”</div>
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The Vermont senator has repeatedly said that the $106,000 income cap on taxpayers paying into Social Security should be removed, and that no filer should be exempt from funding Social Security, regardless of how wealthy they are. <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/08/25/304387/bernie-sanders-introduces-bill-to-lift-the-payroll-tax-cap-ensuring-full-social-security-funding-for-nearly-75-years/" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; color: #0054a6; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Legislation Sanders introduced in 2011</a> would have done just that, ensuring the program would be fully-funded for at least the next 75 years.</div>
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Sanders is likely to make his official campaign announcement by the end of the month. While Elizabeth Warren <a href="http://gravismarketing.com/polling-and-market-research/current-new-hampshire-primary-political-poll/" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; color: #0054a6; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">carries 20 percent</a> of likely Democratic primary voters, there are only 18 months left until the general election and she has yet to travel to either Iowa or New Hampshire, which all serious candidates have done by now. It’s safe to say Warren won’t be running, which means her supporters are likely to migrate to Bernie Sanders’s side, giving him potentially one-third of likely primary voters.</div>
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Given New Hampshire’s proximity to Sanders’s home state of Vermont and the senator’s familiarity with the area and its people, he would have a real shot at winning the New Hampshire primary if he were to run. If Sanders wins in the critical first-in-the-nation primary state, he will finally be seen as a credible candidate for the nomination by the top pollsters and pundits. And if Sanders wins the nomination, Americans will finally have the economic populist presidential candidate they’ve been waiting for. Whether or not this opponent of the billionaire class, corporate greed, Wall Street and environmental degradation – and this champion of working people, the unemployed, retirees, and student debtors – becomes our next president will be entirely up to us.</div>
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<br />NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03499454400310101800noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4272948272257156976.post-34643186831801186662016-04-12T12:07:00.000-07:002016-04-12T12:07:23.686-07:00Arrests made as hundreds of elderly Americans protest at 2nd ‘Democracy Spring’ sit-in<h2>
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<a href="https://www.rt.com/"><span style="font-size: large;">QUESTION MORE</span></a></h3>
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<a href="https://www.rt.com/usa/339363-democracy-spring-protest-elders-arrests/" target="_blank">Arrests made as hundreds of elderly Americans protest at 2nd ‘Democracy Spring’ sit-in</a></h1>
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<time class="date date_article-header" style="color: #999999; display: block; font-size: 1.3em; margin: 0px 0px 0.230769em; padding: 0px; white-space: nowrap;">Published time: 12 Apr, 2016 17:41</time><time class="date date_article-header" style="color: #999999; display: block; font-size: 1.3em; margin: 0px 0px 0.230769em; padding: 0px; white-space: nowrap;">Edited time: 12 Apr, 2016 18:46</time></div>
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Democracy Spring protesters participate in a sit-in at the U.S. Capitol to protest big money in politics, April 11, 2016 in Washington, DC. © Mark Wilson / Getty Images / AFP</div>
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Hundreds of Americans, many of whom are elderly, marched in support of political reform in Washington, DC, taking part in a sit-in and risking arrest as they pushed for fairer elections. RT's "Redacted Tonight" host Lee Camp was detained as he reported from the scene.</div>
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Already, multiple arrests have been made, according to reports from those on the ground near the demonstrations.<br />
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According to RT's correspondents, police have started releasing some of the protesters.</div>
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The sit-in comes one day after more than 400 people were arrested for participating in what has been been termed the “Democracy Spring” movement. The organization has planned for 10 days of demonstrations and mass sit-ins at the US capitol, with day two highlighting efforts from older Americans who want to see change.<br />
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<em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">“As ‘elders’ we have a moral imperative to care for and speak for future generations,”</em> the Democracy Spring website reads. <em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">“We aim to use our wisdom and life experience to guide our actions, and stand together to create our legacy and reclaim our democracy.”</em></div>
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<em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">“Every voice is needed to speak up and say what we know is true – that a thriving and just democracy is the path towards a sustainable world for all children, for all life.”</em></div>
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As protesters marched on the US capitol, many elderly Americans held signs and chanted slogans such as: <em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">"Democracy is not for sale, [we're] not too old to go to jail.”</em><br />
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<em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">“I’m not dead yet; I care deeply; I vote,”</em> read another sign held by a demonstrator.<br />
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Social media users have reported seeing dozens of police officers out to keep an eye on the protesters and make arrests.<br />
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As part of its movement, Democracy Spring is pushing lawmakers to pass legislation that would boost the power of small campaign contributions, offer public funding for political candidates, and update the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in order to protect minority and lower-income voters at the polls.</div>
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The group is also calling for a constitutional amendment that would essentially overturn Supreme Court rulings giving corporations the ability to freely spend in elections. The amendment would end <em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">“the big money dominance of our elections and allows for Congress and the States to set overall limits on campaign spending, including prohibitions on corporate and union spending in the political process.”</em><br />
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NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03499454400310101800noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4272948272257156976.post-15927666939119433812016-03-02T21:18:00.000-08:002016-03-03T05:21:28.375-08:00Why Occupy? Fourth in a Four Part Series: Anarchist Social Justice<br />
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<a href="http://dissidentvoice.org/2015/05/why-occupy-4/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Why Occupy?</a></h1>
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Fourth in a Four Part Series: Anarchist Social Justice</div>
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by Edward Martin and Mateo Pimentel / May 28th, 2015</div>
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In our <a href="http://dissidentvoice.org/2015/05/why-occupy-3/">last publication</a>,
we addressed some of the problems of the TPP. It endangers the planet,
threatens labor, violates human rights, and it globalizes free trade
into another form of neo-imperialism. This is further proof that the 1
percent, both in the United States and around the world, undermine
democratic self-determination in the economic and political realms. We
argue that free markets, as they manifest themselves today, destabilize
the world economy, while fair markets stabilize. Most importantly, the
global economy needs to move away from comparative advantage theory
towards fair competitive advantage. Although it works for the plutocracy
and its corporations, comparative advantage is outdated, and it spells
bad news for the rest of us. We argue for an economy, a global economy,
based on “common pool resource theory,” in which the economy is
understood as a natural resource to be protected just like the
environment. We borrow this idea from Elenor Ostrom. Indeed, it is time
to start thinking about the economy in the same way that we (ought to)
think about preserving the environment and protecting it accordingly.<br />
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What follows is the final part of our analysis of oligarchy.<br />
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<b>Community of Meaning, Popular Justice</b><br />
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As a justifiable reaction to the problem of oligarchy in
organizations and liberal democratic institutions, some theorists and
activists have identified alternative political arrangements to liberal
democratic organizations and institutions. Such anarchist examples
include Chomsky’s recommendations of the Kibbutzim villages of Israel
and the worker-owned cooperatives of Spain’s Mondragon experiments.
Other anarchist examples are based on the New Social Movements (NSM)
school, which, for the most part, have become an activist alternative
means of self-governance through autonomous grass roots organizations
(see Alan Scott’s <i>Ideology and New Social Movements</i>). Leading NSM
theorists include Alain Touraine, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, Claus
Offe, Immanueal Wallerstein, Michel Foucalut, and Jurgen Habermas.
These proponents base their anarchist tendencies on identity, politics,
culture, and ideology, which for all intents and purposes has emerged in
the women’s movement, ecological and environmental movements, LGBTQ
rights, peace movement, and more.<br />
<br />
Currently, anarchist NSM organizations have surfaced in the current
culture through what can be described as the “community of meaning” and
“popular justice.” The goal of these alternative methods of
self-governance is to bypass the rigid oligarchy of the state, and for
that matter, even nonprofit organizations that tend toward oligarchic
structures. As such, the community of meaning concept is based to a
large degree on the anarchist-environmentalist-feminist notion that
human relationships in society are primarily based upon a “conscience
collective,” that is, the fostering of diverse talents and skills within
a local setting (community, neighborhood, school, etc.). The strategy
enables persons to respond to various needs and cultivate unique talents
while striving to maintain sustainable development strategies and
promote “socio-economic justice.” The community of meaning can also be
understood within the context of Marxist anarchist tendencies in which
the state would eventually give way to self-governing communities with
the intention of fostering both individual and collective solidarity
“determined precisely by the connection of individuals, a connection
which consists partly in the economic prerequisites and partly in the
necessary solidarity of the development of all … on the basis of
existing productive forces” (see Marx and Engels, <i>The German Ideology</i>).
Likewise, individuals within a particular community are united,
according to Durkheim, not so much by what they have in common, but
rather, by their very differences, interdependence, and “organic
solidarity.”<br />
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The community of meaning, as Hampson and Reddy assert, becomes an
indispensable condition for cooperation within society and is
subsequently grounded upon ensuring a sustainable planet based on the
fundamental human needs of local communities as the policy priority.
This approach necessarily commits local and global communities, as
Mittleman argues, to sustainable development strategies based upon
mutually interrelated human concerns. Thus, if sustainability is to have
priority in local policy initiatives at both the local and global
community levels, and if public or nonprofit organizations are unable to
meet this criteria, then anarchist communities of meaning must bypass
these institutions and promote local and global strategies favorable to
environmental and socio-economic justice based on sustainable
development goals. The guidelines for a community of meaning, act as a
strategy in which concerned people seek to address the causes of poverty
and simultaneously prevent, and even reverse, environmental
degradation. Moreover, the community of meaning, whether informal or
formal in nature, seeks to implement where possible, policies based on
what is known as “popular justice.” In fact, Engle Merry and Milner
argue that the anarchist combination of the community of meaning and
popular justice strategies “is part of a protest against the state and
its legal system by subordinate, disadvantaged, or marginalized groups.”<br />
<br />
The notion of popular justice for Engle Merry, “is a process for
making decisions and compelling compliance to a set of rules that is
relatively informal in ritual and decorum, nonprofessional in language
and personnel, local in scope, and limited in jurisdiction.”
Theoretically, popular justice governs the community of meaning and
simultaneously attempts to apply local standards and rules, that is
commonsense forms of reasoning to human relationships rather than state
laws. Forums of popular justice, in its original conception, are
specifically intended to resolve disputes that involve small sums of
money, aspects of family life, and interpersonal injury short of murder.
Nevertheless, popular justice forums can act, in similar capacity, as a
model by which environmental and socioeconomic justice concerns can be
addressed as a form of binding arbitration. According to Engel Merry and
Milner, these forums thus create a venue for the less powerful members
of society, such as, “the urban poor, rural peasants, the working class,
minorities, women,” to voice their concerns. In contrast, elites
utilize formal legal institutions through the state, since those same
elites have co-opted those very institutions and can thus control those
institutions for their own ends.<br />
<br />
In the past, popular justice has manifested itself in numerous
venues. One form of popular justice can be identified as “reformist.” In
the reformist tradition popular justice intends to develop adequate
procedures for the varied complexities the legal system facilitates; its
goal is to make the system work more efficiently, not to change its
fundamental principles. This is intended to increase popular
participation in the functions of a centralized judicial system.
Reformist approaches to popular justice usually appear in countries
based on the principles of liberal democracy and capitalist economies.
Failures in the judicial system are generally attributed to the burdens
on the legal system rather than to the underlying structures of
capitalism and its relationship to law and the state. On the other hand,
the socialist tradition of popular justice is derived from
Marxist-Leninist theories about the role of popular justice “tribunals”
to empower the masses to address violations of laws and rules. The role
of the tribunals is to also educate the masses in the creation of the
Marxist “new man” of the revolutionary socialist order. According to
Engle Merry, the masses are included when “socialist popular justice
promises to transform relations of power from the domination of the
bourgeoisie to that of the proletariat.” Yet popular justice in this
tradition tends to reinforce existing structures of power in the same
manner as that of the reformist. Both socialist and reformist approaches
promote a form of institutional justice closely connected to, and
controlled by, the state.<br />
<br />
Another model of popular justice, based on violent uprisings in the
anarchic tradition, is one that is associated with mass revolt against
the state and the existing social order. While anarchic uprisings
certainly can be nonviolent, they nevertheless tend to be violent and
are derived from popular unrest due to perceived social injustices. As a
result of anarchic uprisings, the masses generally intend to terminate
their oppression and punish or reeducate their enemies. In this case the
masses do not rely on an abstract idea of justice, but on their own
experience and extent of the injuries they have suffered. However, this
type of popular justice in its violent form is usually “quelled by the
state or brought under control of local communities.”<br />
<br />
The anarchic-environmentalist-feminist notion of popular justice
associated with the community of meaning, tends to be more closely
connected to, and controlled by, indigenous people and grassroots
movements. While this version of popular justice does not necessarily
rule out its use by elites, it nevertheless attempts to function outside
the state and institutional mechanisms. A withdrawal from society,
which is arguably too rigid, hierarchical and bureaucratic to serve the
needs of a popular majority, is one of the goals of popular justice. The
central understanding of this form of justice, according to Rifkin, is
“decentralization … replacing centralized bureaucracy with small, local
forums on a more humane scale.” In this sense community norms govern
people in a more humanistic and democratic manner while simultaneously
maintaining local autonomy.<br />
<br />
<b>Conclusion</b><br />
<br />
As Weber observes, “How are freedom and democracy in the long run at
all possible under the domination of highly developed capitalism?” Some
would argue that the vast disparity of economic power and wealth that is
increasing in the United States, translates into greater inequality for
the poor and marginalized. The question remains pertinent today. As
this crisis deepens (the contradiction between the egalitarian
expectations of democracy and the rational utility of capital), the
state and its citizenry have the historical choice to address this
conflict. Here, Marcuse urges the human community to initiate “the
radical reconstruction of society … to find there the images and tones
which may break through the established universe of discourse and
preserve the future.” If organizations and their policy outcomes are to
have greater meaning and democratic accountability for the twenty-first
century, and if, in fact, it is worthwhile to understand how
organizations tend to serve elites within these very organizations, and
not the rank and file members that comprise it, then the primary goal of
a democratic society would be to strengthen their democratic
institutions and restructure the allocation of power away from elite
control. As such, anarchist principles of social justice point the way
for this restructuring and renewal of democratic institutions. The
strengthening of democratic institutions must therefore come from
outside these very institutions as a form of ongoing anarchist critique,
agitation, and even civil disobedience if needed. The continued
challenge for committed democrats is to be mindful that democratic
institutions act on behalf of an elite interest and, <i>ipso facto</i>,
subvert democratic egalitarian self-determining groups. Hence,
providing resistance to the oligarchic nature of democratic institutions
in the United States and other democracies through anarchic justice is
vital to democracy and greater democratic participation. Anarchic
resistance to democratic institutions is, in essence, the lifeblood of
democracy.<br />
<br />
Here is what we prescribe. We argue for anarchy as a form of
democratic governance. One way to engender this in the United States is
to move to a parliamentary system. Secondly, we argue for a Marxist form
of economics that prevents exploitation. Additionally, Ostrom’s “common
pool resource theory” is part of the solution. Finally, we argue, along
with C. Wright Mills’ thesis in his great work <i>The Power Elite</i>,
that the state has been coopted by the rich, or the 1 percent, and that
the capitalist class uses the state at the expense of everyone else. In
our next series, we want to take a look at liberalism and address some
of the hidden aspects of social justice hidden therein, specifically
through John Locke and Adam Smith.<br />
<br />
<br />
• Read Part One<b> <a href="http://dissidentvoice.org/2015/05/why-occupy/"><span style="color: red;">here</span></a></b>: Read Part Two<span style="color: red;"> <a href="http://dissidentvoice.org/2015/05/why-occupy-2/"><b><span style="color: red;">here</span></b></a></span>; Read Part Three <a href="http://dissidentvoice.org/2015/05/why-occupy-3/"><b><span style="color: red;">here.</span></b></a><br />
<br />
<div class="author">
Edward Martin is Professor of Public Policy and
Administration, Graduate Center for Public Policy and Administration at
California State University, Long Beach, and co-author of Savage State:
Welfare Capitalism and Inequality;
Mateo Pimentel lives on the Mexican-US border, writing for many
alternative political newsletters and Web sites. He can be reached at: <a href="mailto:mateo.pimentel@gmail.com">mateo.pimentel@gmail.com</a>. <a href="http://dissidentvoice.org/author/edwardmartinmateopimentel/">Read other articles by Edward Martin and Mateo Pimentel</a>.</div>
<div class="author">
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NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03499454400310101800noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4272948272257156976.post-23932007599878808332016-03-02T21:11:00.001-08:002016-03-02T21:11:09.704-08:00Why Occupy? Third in a Four Part Series: Anarchy as Alternative<br />
<br />
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<br />
<h1 class="title">
<a href="http://dissidentvoice.org/2015/05/why-occupy-3/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Why Occupy?</a></h1>
<div class="subhead">
Third in a Four Part Series: Anarchy as Alternative</div>
<div class="subhead">
<br /></div>
<div class="byline">
by Edward Martin and Mateo Pimentel / May 21st, 2015</div>
<div class="byline">
<br /></div>
In Parts <a href="http://dissidentvoice.org/2015/05/why-occupy/">One</a> and <a href="http://dissidentvoice.org/2015/05/why-occupy-2/">Two</a>
of this series, we argued that to prevent oligarchic rule, democratic
and economic institutions need to be salvaged, ironically, through
anarchist political activism and Marxist capital analysis, specifically
Marx’s labor theory of value, which identifies the systemic and
structural nature of exploitation. The point is that workers are
“entitled” to the surplus value they create. We also argued that
globalization as manifested in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP),
amounts to imperialism. In this particular case, we utilize the economic
analysis provided by British economist John Hobson. In his great work <i>Imperialism, </i>Hobson,
an anti-imperialist capitalist, argues something far more insightful
than Marx ever did. The worst that Marx had ever claimed about
capitalism was that the system would literally destroy itself. What
Hobson argues is that, not only will the system destroy itself, but that
taken to a global level the capitalist system will destroy the world.
Imagine that, coming from a capitalist. Contrary to popular scholarship,
many Marxists claim this same conclusion, such as Lenin, Magdoff, and
Sweezy. But it was Hobson who originally argued that capitalism would
have to extend beyond its own borders to maintain its competitive edge
and control markets outside of its own country. This is compounded by
the fact that other countries are forced to do the same, and in so
doing, set the stage for a form of economic competition known as “trade
wars.” Consequently unbridled, international, globalized capitalism will
undermine the dynamic nature of markets, which on the other hand, given
rational boundaries, can be an effective and efficient mechanism for
allocating scarce economic goods, services, and resources. Take a look
at any of the works by World Systems Theorists such as Immanuel
Wallerstein and Andre Gunder Frank.<br />
<br />
Now to the point: The Trans-Pacific Partnership follows along these
same lines. Though our information is based on a leak, from WikiLeaks,
we have no reason to doubt the veracity of this leak since to-date,
WikiLeaks has never been wrong. So we proceed.<br />
<br />
The Trans-Pacific Partnership can be broken down accordingly.<br />
<br />
(1) The Partnership basically is a secret plan for international
elites to capture and exploit underdeveloped markets. This means that
underdeveloped markets, in least-developed countries can be exploited,
meaning their labor force extorted and environmental restrictions
obliterated. This extends to Australia and New Zealand as well, though
they are not “developing” countries. Nevertheless, the point of
“fast-track” legislation is to conceal this economic and environmental
disaster arrangement.<br />
<br />
(2) TPP will harm the global environment. In this arrangement, the
environment will no longer be protected, and already weakened domestic
and international environmental regulations will further harm the
environment, which has a direct effect on the health of the populations
of these countries, including the people of the United States. In fact,
the fracking industry will have no regulations placed on it at all.
There will be no limit on increased carbon emissions, which invariably
contaminates the earth, water, air, and ozone. Liquid natural gas
exports to TPP countries will have no environmental regulations either,
and in the United States, no environmental clearance at all from the
Department of Energy.<br />
<br />
(3) Labor in TPP countries will be subject to increased pressure to
provide concessions, along with health benefits, job security, etc. This
includes the United States. And with the export of capital, jobs in the
United States become at-risk, if not, lost completely. The potential
for leveraging international labor for increased profits and
productivity becomes paramount in their business plan. In other words,
pay labor a subsistence wage and maximize profits and productivity at
all costs for the shareholders. Can you imagine trying to unionize?
Under this agreement, it is unknown what rights organized labor has in
TPP countries, specifically Australia, New Zealand, and the United
States. We know what the situation is for labor in non-democratic
countries such as Vietnam and Brunai. Zip!<br />
<br />
(4) As in authoritarian and totalitarian countries, the TPP intends
to criminalize Internet access and expression. Criticizing and
protesting this trade agreement will be met with legal action based on
TPP surveillance. The policing and surveillance will take place within
TPP countries, making dissent on the economic and environmental impacts
due to the TPP, punishable by law. Sovereignty and due process are
absent. Thus the goal of intimidation of dissident groups is effectively
quelled from the outset. Moreover, the rights of corporations involved
in the TPP give them the ability to sue those groups or individuals who
seek economic or environmental damages from those countries
participating in the TPP. In other words, foreign and international
firms are elevated to the level of sovereign status within the United
States and can then sue for damages.<br />
<br />
(5) Democratic governance under TPP has been subordinated to market
rationale. This is not the way that democratic societies and
international institutions should be run. Nor is the TPP something that a
democratic government should espouse, even though Barak Obama, Chris
Matthews, Lawrence O’Donnell, Chris Hayes, Jonathan Altar, Charles
Krauthammer, Fox News, <em>et al</em>, argue has always been the way
trade agreements have been carried out. We say fuck no! Occupy said bull
shit to this. And if it weren’t for the labor unions, Elizabeth Warren,
Bernie Sanders, Rachel Maddow, and Ed Shultz speaking out against this,
TPP would be a done deal right now. And the pro TPP people keep saying
the anti TPP are just wrong. Well, there is one way to resolve this
pissing match … open up the deal to the light of day and let’s have at
it. But you know they won’t because this deal is meant to bone American
and TPP participant countries’ labor and environment. Of course, they
will use the same line going back to the Reagan era where if the elites
get rich, then it will trickle down to everyone.<br />
<br />
(6) All of this is possible because the corporate and power elite in
this country, and outside of this country, for all intents and purposes,
control <i>our</i> government. The following is our continued analysis
of why oligarchic arrangements in the United States have led to the
Occupy movement of Wall Street. This also pertains to the clandestine
TPP operation and its economic quest for domination. And this same
oligarchic dimension also applies to the Department of Justice and the
recent exoneration by the new Attorney General, Loretta Lynch, of the
corporate chiefs found guilty of fraud re: Citicorp (C), JPMorgan Chase
(JPM), London-based Barclays (BCS) and Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS).
They get fined 2 billion dollars but they get to keep the 62 billion
remaining. This shit is getting outrageous!<br />
<br />
Next week we will conclude with our fourth and final entry. We will
elaborate on an explanation of how we can break this newest sinister arm
of the oligarchic arrangement. It will go beyond political anarchy,
Marx’s labor theory of value, and anti-imperialist capitalism. We want
markets to work and so we are going to argue that markets optimize when
they are responsive to the general will of the people and thus promote
the common good. Here’s a clue: liberal notions of labor entitlements
from capitalist gurus and a free market freak, fair enterprise Nobel
economist, influenced by the Austrian school of economics. What the
hell! We’re using a former socialist gone fascist to explain the
phenomena of oligarchies in democratic political and economic
institutions. Why not use liberal thought? Maybe the answer was there
all along…<br />
<br />
<b>Anarchism and Oligarchic State </b><br />
<br />
The tendency of organizations (democratic governments, political
parties, unions, etc.) is to become oligarchic and therefore obfuscate
and undermine democratic rule. Thus it is plausible that the very
legitimacy of “democratic” government is in question, especially because
oligarchic rule does not serve the general will of the people and the
purposes of self-governance. Rather, it serves an elite cadre within
organizations in which individuals position themselves for control of
the organizations. Liberal democratic self-governance is in question,
specifically as it relates to contemporary liberal theorists such as
John Rawls in <i>A Theory of Justice</i>, and Robert Nozick in <i>Anarchy, State and Utopia</i>.
Both liberal theories – Rawls’ in prioritizing legal rights for those
least advantaged in society (welfare rights), and Nozick’s in
prioritizing maximum individual liberty (libertarianism) – are
challenged by oligarchic tendencies, that is, if Michels’ position is
correct. This oligarchic tendency is also present in radical and Marxist
democratic organizations that argue for democratic rights as the
foundation of economic social justice in a democratic society. Reinhold
Niebuhr, Edward Banfield, Amartya Sen, and Rodney Peffer all espouse
this tradition.<br />
<br />
The problem associated with the inherent nature of democratic
organizations to emerge as non-democratic oligarchies is exactly what
anarchism seeks to confront. Anarchist critiques of the oligarchic and
authoritarian tendencies of Enlightenment liberalism and capitalist
development according to its chief spokespersons, such as, Gerrard
Winstanley, William Godwin, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Henry David Thoreau,
Benjamin Tucker, and Emma Goldman and contemporary critiques of modern
liberalism, liberal democracies and neoliberal capitalism by
philosophical anarchists such as Charles Frankel, Noam Chomsky, Michael
Albert, Murray Bookchin, Robert Paul Wolff and A. John Simmons, demand
serious attention. Here the understanding is that government, law, and
public policy, is hardly justification for moral guidance in the lives
of people. In fact, government coercion for anarchists is the very basis
of tyranny because it violates the very nature of autonomous and free
individuals and communities. Nonviolent civil disobedience, therefore,
becomes the <em>modus operandi</em> of anarchists and government dissenters in this tradition.<br />
<br />
Early seventeenth century British anarchist, Gerrard Winstanley,
argued that the capitalist accumulation of wealth and property resulted
in greater social inequality and that land should be understood as a
“common treasury,” and that the promotion of federalism within nations
and internationalism promoted throughout the world represented the
earliest developments in anarchist theory. Winstanley argued that
peasants possessed the fundamental human right to the wealth they create
and to the land that they worked. Known as the “Diggers,” Winstanley
urged peasants to “squat” on stretches of unused common land in Southern
England in order to provide themselves with both a domicile and a
living. Moreover, for Winstanley, the individual person is marginalized
by both monarchical and parliamentary (democratic) rule. For anarchists,
both authoritarian and democratic rule resulted in plutocratic elite
domination. Much like today’s libertarian movement, anarchists believed
that the individual person should be given the utmost possible freedom
and that voluntary institutions best represent the human person’s
natural social tendencies. Yet, the voluntary association of unionized
workers, pitted against the elite control and possession of capital,
clearly differentiates anarchists from libertarians. Marxists, on the
other hand, differ from anarchists for the most part precisely over the
role of the state, since the state has a role to play in the
revolutionary class struggle. Anarchists would not deny that class
warfare results from capitalist exploitation; however, they tend to view
any role of the state in resolving this conflict as lacking any
political legitimacy.<br />
<br />
Later eighteenth century British anarchists, such as William Godwin,
argued that violent revolutionary action was a legitimate course of
action in the event that the new “capitalist state” became increasingly
tyrannical, especially in light of the gross inequities of the
burgeoning industrial revolution. Godwin argued for a “fixed and
immutable” universal natural law as fundamental to justice. Here, Godwin
argued that justice itself was based on fundamental human rights, but
that human laws could potentially be fallible and that reason and
conscience dictates obedience or disobedience to human law. Godwin,
furthermore, rejected all established institutions and all social
relations that suggested inequality or the power of one person over
another, including marriage. Influenced by the anarchist tendencies in
the social and political philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, William
Godwin argued that while government might be considered necessary for
the short term, in the long run it would eventually become obsolete when
others with their very freedom and autonomy would be secured through
the non-interference in others’ lives. Godwin further argued that
individuals should act in accordance with their own judgments and that
in return others should be allowed the same liberty.<br />
<br />
Nineteenth-century European anarchism developed independently from
the earlier British version. It grew out of French socialist thought and
German Neo-Hegelianism, as fused by Pierre Proudhon who in turn
profoundly influenced Marx and his development of anarchist thought, and
later theorists such as Michael Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, and Georges
Sorel. This form of anarchism sought to eliminate the role of the state
and simultaneously uphold the greatest amount of freedom based on three
main areas: (1) the use of violence as a means to overthrow
authoritarian rule; (2) the establishment and respect for individual
liberty and human rights; and (3) the promotion of economic and social
institutions that foster individual freedom and the common good. With
the exception of anarchists such as Pierre Proudhon, Henry David
Thureau, Leo Tolstoy, Robert Tucker, and Mohandas Ghandi, who rejected
violence as a form of revolutionary action, most anarchists in the
nineteenth century have sought to abolish injustice and establish a
socially just society based on the above three categories. Thoreau,
Tolstoy, Tucker, and Ghandi urged peaceful nonviolent civil disobedience
as an alternative to violent revolutionary action.<br />
<br />
Philosophical anarchists argue, within the same basic anarchist
tradition (e.g., mutualism, anarcho-syndicalism, collectivism,
individualism, pacifism, Wobblies, trade unionism, Marxist Anarchism,
left libertarianism) that authoritarian systems are not the only form of
state oppression but that the modern democratic state itself has
become, fundamentally, an instrument by which elites and special
interests in a liberal democracy coerce and even use their power to
oppress others. Therefore the state, by virtue of its liberal nature:
(1) lacks legitimacy because the state serves elite interests at the
expense of individual and collective self-governance; and (2) impedes
individual autonomy and self-determination by compelling individuals to
obey the state through coercion (rules, regulations, and laws), and even
force (police and military action).<br />
Philosophical anarchists thus argue that individuals, according to
their conscience, have the moral right not to comply with the state and
even the moral obligation to disobey the state in the event that the
policies and laws of a particular government violate the conscience of
individual citizens. Godwin argued for a radical egalitarian society
where each person should take part in the production of necessities and
should share their part in the production of necessities with all in
need. Here conceived, a society of free land workers and artisans, was
the first outline of an anarchist society. This is the “socialist” roots
of anarchism trump those of any libertarian element.<br />
<br />
In the past other more militant schools of anarchist thought,
including those of nineteenth century figures such as Bakunin,
Kropotkin, and Marx, argued that it was necessary for the exploited
working class to overthrow the state and its controlling capitalist
class, violently if necessary. Philosophical anarchists argue that,
rather than taking up arms to bring down the state, the optimal
situation is to work for gradual change to free individuals from what
they perceive to be oppressive laws and social constraints of the modern
state and allow all individuals to become self-determining autonomous
actors in the world.<br />
<br />
While philosophical anarchists oppose the immediate elimination of
the state by violent means, they adhere to this primarily out of concern
that what might remain in place after a given revolution could very
well become the establishment of a more harmful and oppressive state.
This is especially true among those anarchists who consider violence and
the state as synonymous, or who consider it counterproductive, and
where public reaction to violence could result in increased “law
enforcement” or the reinforcement of the “police state.” Subsequently,
philosophical anarchists reject, for the most part, the urge to violence
as a means for eliminating the “illegitimate” state, while at the same
time they accept the existence of a minimal state as an unfortunate, but
“necessary evil.”<br />
<br />
A. John Simmons claims that “philosophical anarchists hold that there
are good reasons not to oppose or disrupt at least some kinds of
illegitimate states, reasons that outweigh any right or obligation of
opposition. The practical stance with respect to the state, the
philosophical anarchist maintains, should be one of careful
consideration and thoughtful weighing of all the reasons that bear on
action in a particular set of circumstances.” And Robert Paul Wolff
further states that while philosophical anarchists may not wish to
disrupt a particular state, they do not necessarily think anyone has an
obligation to obey the state. There can be no such thing as a government
that “has a right to command and whose subjects have a binding
obligation to obey.”<br />
<br />
<b>Postmodern Anarchism</b><br />
<br />
Other forms of anarchism, such as postmodern anarchism, have been
developed by theorists such as May, Newman, and Call, who assert that
the anarchist writings of Nietzsche, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Freud,
Durkheim, Levi-Strauss, Foucault, Baudrillard, and Chomsky, intersect
with postmodern critiques of modernism, rationalism, and scientism.
Specifically, this theoretical construct, where anarchism and
postmodernism meet, moves beyond anarchism’s conventional attacks on
capital and the state to criticize those forms of rationality,
consciousness, and language that implicitly condition all economic and
political power. May, Newman, and Call, argue that postmodernism
contemporizes anarchism, making it relevant to the current political
culture of the twenty-first century.<br />
<br />
The postmodern anarchists draw on the works of several theorists in
an attempt to connect anarchism with postmodernism. May, Newman, and
Call, use anarchism to critique liberal notions of language,
consciousness, and rationality, which are inherent within capitalist
state organizations, and use postmodern methods to deconstruct
hegemonies of all sorts, predominantly those dominant ideas and beliefs
at the heart of capitalist and Marxist ideology. Yet, their sharpest
postmodern attack is leveled against bourgeois liberalism and its
manifestation in “late capitalism,” or as Veblen describes it,
“conspicuous consumption.” Here the postmodern anarchists nevertheless
identify classical anarchism as being fundamentally opposed to
hierarchical (paternalistic) social relations inherent in capitalist
modes of production and state socialist regimes. It therefore rejects
state capitalist of state socialist uses of force and the “coercive
politics implicit in all state systems. Such anarchism envisions
strictly voluntary (and typically small-scale) forms of organization,”
devoid of any reliance on modernism’s devotion to rationality as an
organizing principle typified by Western culture. In this sense,
postmodern anarchists argue that liberal democracies can become, and
often do become, oppressive hegemonies controlled by a power-elite
precisely “to prevent radical change.” Postmodern anarchists such as
Call, argue that although “liberalism represents an impressive and
historically important body of work … [it] imposes a disturbing silence
upon radical thinking.” In rejecting Rorty’s liberal principles (and
those of other great liberals such as Holms, Rawls, Nozick, Dworkin,
etc.), of avoiding harm and cruelty to others, liberalism as applied to a
democratic society “functions to defend existing institutions and to
prevent radical change.”<br />
<br />
<br />
<div class="author">
Edward Martin is Professor of Public Policy and
Administration, Graduate Center for Public Policy and Administration at
California State University, Long Beach, and co-author of Savage State:
Welfare Capitalism and Inequality;
Mateo Pimentel lives on the Mexican-US border, writing for many
alternative political newsletters and Web sites. He can be reached at: <a href="mailto:mateo.pimentel@gmail.com">mateo.pimentel@gmail.com</a>. <a href="http://dissidentvoice.org/author/edwardmartinmateopimentel/">Read other articles by Edward Martin and Mateo Pimentel</a>.</div>
<div class="author">
<br /></div>
<div class="postmeta">
This article was posted on Thursday, May 21st, 2015 at 10:08pm and is filed under <a href="http://dissidentvoice.org/category/anarchism/" rel="category tag">Anarchism</a>, <a href="http://dissidentvoice.org/category/capitalism/" rel="category tag">Capitalism</a>, <a href="http://dissidentvoice.org/category/philosophy/" rel="category tag">Philosophy</a>, <a href="http://dissidentvoice.org/category/economics/tpp/" rel="category tag">TPP</a>. </div>
NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03499454400310101800noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4272948272257156976.post-79751531645080515922016-03-02T20:54:00.000-08:002016-03-02T20:54:58.038-08:00Why Occupy? Second in a four-part series.<br />
<br />
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<h1 class="title">
<a href="http://dissidentvoice.org/2015/05/why-occupy-2/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Why Occupy?</a></h1>
<div class="subhead">
Second in a four-part series.</div>
<div class="subhead">
<br /></div>
<div class="byline">
by Edward Martin and Mateo Pimentel / May 14th, 2015</div>
<div class="byline">
<br /></div>
In <a href="http://dissidentvoice.org/2015/05/why-occupy/">Part One</a>
of this series, we argued that anarchy is the solution to the problem
of oligarchic control of democratic institutions. This holds true for
economic institutions as well. And no better example can be provided
than Obama’s sinister Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which is designed
in neoliberal fashion to financially reward the 1 percent on Wall
Street and the 1 percent internationally, because it is all about the
international elite, not just the average people in the United States
who are expendable under the TPP arrangement. Obama knows this. We argue
that it is not just anarchism that will salvage democratic
institutions, but also a Marxist economic vision that refuses to allow
workers in the United States and international community to be
exploited. Marx was correct when he argued that capitalism rests
essentially on the exploitation of the working class. The problem
remains one of conflict between labor and capital, which people like
Paul Krugman the Keynesian and journalists like Chris Matthews the
liberal refuse to acknowledge. The TPP is not some Greek tragedy where
the actors are blind to their own demise; rather, they know completely
what the outcomes are going to be for themselves at the expense of
others. Read <i>Development, Democracy and Welfare States: Latin America, East Asia, and Eastern Europe</i>
by Stephan Haggard and Robert R. Kaufman (2008)—they saw this coming.
This is the motive for Occupy and why the oligarchy has got to go. What
this form of globalization accomplishes is simply a reinforcement of
neocolonialism and neoimperialism. In the third part of this series, we
will pull apart the TPP, which is nothing more than NAFTA on meth. The
following is our continuation of why oligarchies are perpetuated in
democratic institutions.<br />
<br />
<b>Domination and Control of Institutions</b><br />
<br />
Individuals who have ultimate authority in an organization are the
ones who have the final decision-making power over the organization’s
system of rewards or punishments, its budget and personnel, its policies
and property. This means that enforceable authority has the power to
exclude others from control over it. Organizational proprietors exercise
“ultimate authority” and are invested, not solely by tradition or
sentiment, but by state charter with the right to deal with the
organization’s incorporated resources. Directors, trustees, and owners
exercise power either by occupying the top positions in which ruling
decisions are made or by hiring and firing those who do. William Domhoff
asserts that:<br />
<blockquote>
…control is in the hands of the board of directors, a
group of men usually numbering between ten and twenty-five who meet once
or twice a month to decide upon the major policies of the company. In
addition … the board always includes at least the top two or three
officers in charge of day-to-day operations … We consider the boards
decisive because, despite the necessity of delegating minor decisions
and technical research, they make major decisions, such as those of
investment, and select the men who will carry out daily operations. In
fact, their power to change management if the performance of the company
does not satisfy them is what we … mean by control.</blockquote>
Consequently, Michael Walzer observes that the directors of most organizations:<br />
<blockquote>
…preside over what are essentially authoritarian regimes
with no internal electoral system, no opposition parties, no free press
or open communications network, no established judicial procedures, no
channels for rank-and-file participation in decision making. When the
state acts to protect their authority, it does so through the property
system, that is, it recognizes the corporation as the private property
of some determinate group of men and it protects their right to do,
within legal limits, what they please with their property. When
corporate officials defend themselves, they often involve functional
arguments. They claim that the parts they play in society can only be
played by such men as they, with their legally confirmed power, their
control of resources, their freedom from internal challenge, and their
ability to call on the police.</blockquote>
The boards of directors of most business firms do not exercise a
“collegial” power except in the formal, legal sense. In other terms,
even among themselves directors seldom operate democratically since
usually one or two of them enjoy a preponderant influence over the
corporation. Bruce Berman notes that private power is exercised both “in
the economy and society” through “organizations whose internal
political processes are, with few exceptions, authoritarian, oligarchic
and devoid of any democratic procedures or controls.” Where the board of
directors consists of corporate employees dependent on the president
for career advancement, the board simply reaffirms past decisions or
presents modest but inconsequential changes. Top corporate managers,
themselves board members and large stockholders, are the active power
within a firm, selecting new members, exercising a daily influence over
decisions, and enjoying a degree of independence. This same scenario can
easily be translated into nonprofit institutions, education, churches,
government, unions, administration and policy. Furthermore, the
institutionally controlled roles are themselves so legitimized by
practice and custom, that the coercive element of this oligarchic
arrangement is in effect disguised.<br />
<br />
It appears evident, at least from what has been discussed, that
authority is delegated downward within an organizational system and
institutional structure and that it is extended, in anti-democratic
fashion, in order to better serve those at elevated levels. Ralf
Dahrendorf states:<br />
<blockquote>
For the bureaucrats the supreme social reality is their
career that provides, at least in theory, a direct link between every
one of them and the top positions which may be described as the ultimate
seat of authority. It would be false to say that the bureaucrats are a
ruling class, but in any case they are part of it, and one would
therefore expect them to act accordingly in industrial, social and
political conflicts.</blockquote>
Rousseau refers to people in this elite category as persons “hurried
on by blind ambition, and, looking rather below than above them, come to
love authority more than independence, and submit to slavery, that they
may in turn enslave others.” Interestingly enough, Adam Smith also
identifies this anti-egalitarian tendency when he states:<br />
<blockquote>
All inferior shepherds and herdsmen feel the security of
their own herds and flocks depends upon the security of those of the
great shepherd or herdsman; that the maintenance of their lesser
authority depends upon that of his greater authority, and that upon
their subordination to him depends his power of keeping their inferiors
in subordination to them.</blockquote>
The monopolization of privileged positions and scarce resources by
the hierarchical elite in an organization is justified by the claim that
only experienced persons or trained experts have the expertise to
participate in decision-making. However, Francis Rourke and Glen Brooks
state the organizations and institutions are “often forced to put on a
dramatic show of scientific objectivity in its budgeting process in
order to justify its requests for continued support, even though the
dramatic props – elaborate formulas, statistical ratios, and so on – may
have little to do with the way in which decisions are actively made
within the … establishment.” Thus, a modern hierarchical organization
with its elaborate stratification of command and fragmentation of tasks
may itself be less the outgrowth of technical necessity and more a means
whereby the few control the many. Consequently, Michels argues that
the bureaucratic structure within organizations has two main functions:
efficiency and class domination. The former is admitted, open and
manifest; the later covert, unrecognized (by many) and unadmitted. In
this sense, class conflict declines with the growth of bureaucracy, not
because bureaucracy’s efficiency and productivity satisfies potential
dissenters, but because the <i>structural features</i> of bureaucracy
stifle the power resources of potential dissenters. It would therefore
be correct to say that bureaucratization is another form of class
conflict, a form in which one side wins and the other loses—and which
might better be called class domination.<br />
<br />
<b>Organizations and Their Enlightened Self-Interest</b><br />
<br />
Most organizations, arguably, are linked by a commonality of class
interest. The common misunderstanding is to treat the diversity of
organizations as a manifestation of the diffusion of power. Robert Lynd
states that, “sheer multiplicity of organizations in society may not be
assumed to indicate their discreteness and autonomy …” More often than
not, the interaction of power between organizations and institutions is
neither voluntary nor equal, since some institutions “occupy positions
of established dependence upon other institutions.” This presupposes a
distribution of power that some organizations possess more than others.
Consequently, the resources of power are not randomly scattered among
the population to be used in autonomous ways, but are distributed within
a social system, and the way the system is organized has a decisive
effect on what resources are available to whom. Any delineation of the
resources of power would include property, wealth organization, social
prestige, social legitimacy, number of adherents, various kinds of
knowledge and leadership skills, access to technology, control of jobs,
control of information, manipulation of symbolic expressions, and the
ability to apply force and violence. Thus, if organizations and
institutions have power as their major interest, and the maintenance of a
class dominated society, then it can logically be concluded that there
are elements in society that lack power. Lacking accessibility to power
resources, certain classes of people will chronically gain a deficient
share of necessities. These people, mostly children in the United
States, do not participate as decision makers in most of the
arrangements directly affecting their lives. They have no lobbies, no
voice in the political system, no appeal from the vested interests of
certain adults. The elderly, women, handicapped, and people of color, at
least those in lower social classes, can be considered among the
powerless in society as well.<br />
<br />
Every privileged class tends to propagate the notion that the
existing social system constitutes the natural order of things. In this
way, those elite members of organizations give legitimacy and permanence
to their position. These elites, according to Weber, intend “to have
their social and economic positions ‘legitimized.’ They wish to see
their positions transformed from a purely factual power relation into a
cosmos of acquired rights, and to know that they are thus sanctified.”
The legitimating myths, or “status-legends” serve not only to bolster
the self-esteem and soothe the conscience of the elite within
organizations, but reinforce the important function of assigning an
almost divine status to class dominance and the rule of elites within
organizations. Rousseau captures this same idea when he states that “the
strongest is never strong enough to be always master, unless he
transforms his strength into right, and obedience into duty.” This can
be seen in present day capitalist societies; profit and property are
represented as serving not only the owning class but also all citizens.
What corporations do for themselves is said to benefit the entire “Free
World.” In the <i>German Ideology</i> Marx identified this tendency in
which every group seeks to give “its ideas the form of universality and
[attempts] to present them as the only rational and universally valid
ones.” Both Marx and Engels held that throughout history, and in
particular the historical development of capitalism, that government had
been controlled by key capitalists and their allies, and thus the state
in effect serves as the “executive committee” of the ruling and
exploiting class.<br />
<br />
In a society based on acquisition and competition, people acting in
their self-interest do not readily sacrifice their own class advantages
out of regard for the needs of others. Any notion of justice, based on
utility maximizing, is not likely to compel “individual actors” to cast
aside their own privatized pursuits. The history of class divided
societies offers little hope to those who do not share in the relative
access of resources in the midst of scarcity. In the absence of its
natural defenders the interest of the excluded is always in danger of
being overlooked according to both Mill and Marx. Theorists such as
Lindblom and Woodhouse state that the common understanding is that, “the
fundamentals of the existing system of wealth and privilege ought not
be challenged.” Moreover, borrowing from Lenin’s critique of Western
imperialism, Martin Luther King in the “Letter from Birmingham Jail,”
concludes that “history is the long and tragic story of the fact that
privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily.” And
Obama has become a team player for the privileged elite because of the
TPP treaty.<br />
<br />
Thus, the threatened loss of power in organizations, and the tendency
toward a more equal distribution of wealth and privilege, is seen not
merely as a material loss, but as the cataclysmic undoing of all social
order. Operating on the assumption that all distribution must be
competitive rather than communal, the elite anticipate – correctly –
that more material resources for the marginalized will only mean less
for themselves, since a fundamental reordering of social priorities
would entail a marked diminution of class privileges for the elite.
Within this social and economic setting the reality of conflict is
spawned and determined, according to Marx, precisely because “men make
their own history; but they do not make it just as they please; they do
not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under
circumstances directly encountered, given, and transmitted from the
past.” Here Rousseau and Marx agree, arguing that the elite of any
organization enjoy their status “only in so far as others are destitute
of it. Because, without changing their condition, they would cease to
be happy the moment the people ceased to be wretched.” Consequently,
Rousseau argues that “we find our advantage in the misfortune of our
fellow-creatures, and the loss of one man almost always constitutes the
prosperity of another.” Noam Chomsky even goes so far as to state that
organizations such as these are “designed to undermine democratic
decision making and to safeguard the matters from market discipline. It
is the poor and defenseless who are to be instructed in these stern
doctrines.”<br />
<br />
<b>Oligarchy as the Iron Law</b> <i> </i><i> </i><br />
<br />
Weber examines the relationship between democracy and bureaucratic
organizations and discovers a paradoxical relationship between the two
institutions. Some legal requirements further democracy as well as
bureaucracy, such as the principle of “equal justice under the law.”
This would also include technical and scientific knowledge rather than
arbitrary decisions. Nevertheless, according to Weber, “‘democracy’ as
such is opposed to the ‘rule’ of bureaucracy, in spite and perhaps
because of its unavoidable yet unintended promotion of
bureaucratization.” A major reason for this is that bureaucracy
concentrates power in the hands of those in charge of the bureaucratic
apparatus and thereby undermines democracy. Robert Michels, in <i>Political Parties</i>,
also argues from another perspective, that a number of complex
tendencies in organizations oppose the realization of democracy. He
postulates that democracy leads to oligarchy and consequently the elite
domination of policy outcomes. Michels goes on to state:<br />
<blockquote>
It follows that the explanation of the oligarchical
phenomenon which thus results … from the consolidation of every
disciplined political aggregate … reduced to its most concise
expression, the fundamental sociological law of political parties (the
term ‘political’ being here used in its most comprehensive significance)
may be formulated in the following terms: ‘It is organization which
gives birth to the dominion of the elected over the electors, of the
manditaries over the mandators, of the delegates over the delegators.
Who says organization says oligarchy.</blockquote>
Michels’ thesis in the “iron law of oligarchy,” challenges Rousseau’s
concept of direct popular rule and both Madison and Jefferson’s
representative form of democracy. The dysfunctional nature of existing
democracy, for Michels, is not simply the result of social and economic
underdevelopment and alienation, inadequate education, media control of
propaganda advertisements, or the capitalist control of government
organizations and institutions. Rather, the problem of democracy is
rooted in its organic nature, and according to Michels’ logic, any
organization must confront its tendency to be controlled at the top. He
states, “The formation of oligarchies within the various forms of
democracy is the outcome of organic necessity, and consequently affects
every organization.” This phenomenon, for Michels, is an intrinsic
dimension of bureaucracy and any large-scale organization or
institution. As a result, “Every party organization represents an
oligarchical power grounded upon a democratic basis. We find everywhere
electors and elected. Also we find everywhere that the power of the
elected leaders over the electing masses is almost unlimited. The
oligarchical structure of the building suffocates the basic democratic
principle.” Thus large-scale social organizations and democracy are
incompatible, which is a position similar to Lowi’s notion that elitist
interest-group liberalism undermines democracy and Olson’s theory that
large groups fail to identify and act on their self-interest, reinforce
Michels’ position that the elite emerge from democratic dysfunction to
dominate organizations. Michels found that even socialist organizations
and trade unions that valued democracy could not pursue their goals,
even with strong leadership. From this Michels proposed a general law
that “the majority of human beings … are predestined by tragic
necessity, to submit to the dominion of a small minority, and must be
content to constitute the pedestal of an oligarchy.”<br />
<br />
The underlying notion of a liberal democracy is that government
organizations and institutions are to be administered in a democratic
fashion by majority rule, respect for minority rights, freedom of speech
and dissent, based on a constitutional framework. On the other hand,
while democratic values and policies are to be implemented, the task
must be implemented through the most efficient and effective
administrative methods available. Therefore agencies, governed primarily
by the principle of efficiency and effectiveness, tend to act in an
autocratic fashion. Nevertheless, if Michels’ argument is a sound one,
then the implications for government are startling: <i>organizations and their subsequent policies are held captive by an elite clientele</i>.
The reality of an elite ruling government agencies, and for that
matter, political parties, unions, religious organizations, etc.,
conveys the idea that popular rule is subverted. This leaves little
doubt organizations and institutions by their very nature are
predisposed inherently to being co-opted by an elite faction.<i> Thus organizations and institutions are designed to serve the interests of an elite cadre and not its rank and file members.</i><br />
<br />
In summary, the “iron law of oligarchy,” with respect to democratic
organizations and policy outcomes, functions in four different
capacities. Organizations and policy outcomes: (1) mobilize the forces
of indoctrination and formal socialization in the direction of
established interests and dominant values; (2) control the means of
rewards and punishments based on organizational structures and behavior;
(3) preempt competing behavioral forms and thus structure the
definition of “reality” to the advantage of the elite; and, (4)
reinforce their own existence by preventing any question or ideological
challenge to its purpose and mission. Thus Michels believed that any
organization or political system, democratic or egalitarian, becomes
oligarchic and therefore undemocratic.<br />
<br />
• Parts 3 and 4 to follow<br />
<br />
<div class="author">
Edward Martin is Professor of Public Policy and
Administration, Graduate Center for Public Policy and Administration at
California State University, Long Beach, and co-author of Savage State:
Welfare Capitalism and Inequality;
Mateo Pimentel lives on the Mexican-US border, writing for many
alternative political newsletters and Web sites. He can be reached at: <a href="mailto:mateo.pimentel@gmail.com">mateo.pimentel@gmail.com</a>. <a href="http://dissidentvoice.org/author/edwardmartinmateopimentel/">Read other articles by Edward Martin and Mateo Pimentel</a>.</div>
<div class="author">
<br /></div>
<div class="postmeta">
This article was posted on Thursday, May 14th, 2015 at 6:59pm and is filed under <a href="http://dissidentvoice.org/category/capitalism/" rel="category tag">Capitalism</a>, <a href="http://dissidentvoice.org/category/corporate-globalization/" rel="category tag">Corporate Globalization</a>, <a href="http://dissidentvoice.org/category/neoliberalism/" rel="category tag">Neoliberalism</a>. </div>
NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03499454400310101800noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4272948272257156976.post-66381258036799634982016-03-02T18:32:00.000-08:002016-03-02T22:56:30.941-08:00Why Occupy? First in a four-part series<br />
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<h1 class="title">
<a href="http://dissidentvoice.org/2015/05/why-occupy/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Why Occupy?</a></h1>
<div class="subhead">
First in a four-part series</div>
<div class="subhead">
<br /></div>
<div class="byline">
by Edward Martin and Mateo Pimentel / May 8th, 2015</div>
<div class="byline">
<br /></div>
<div class="byline">
<br /></div>
There is a tendency for democratic self-governing institutions to
become oligarchies, specifically because elite interests within these
institutions are prioritized over the needs of their members. According
to researchers, such as Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, and
conservative theorists, such as Robert Michels, democratic institutions
primarily serve elite interests. In “Testing Theories of American
Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens”, (in <em>Perspectives on Politics</em>,
September 2014 Vol. 12/No. 3, p.564-581), Gilens and Page argue that
oligarchies within democratic institutions ultimately undermine their
democratic goals, in which the institution is co-opted by elites. And on
the other hand, conservatives like Michels (in his book <em>Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Organizational Tendencies of Modern Democracy</em>,
1911) argue, “It is organization which gives birth to the domination of
the elected over the electors, of the mandatories over the mandators,
of the delegates over the delegators. Who says organization, says
oligarchy.” Thus, for Michels, democratic institutions undermine
themselves precisely because they are held captive by oligarchs and
elites.<br />
<br />
So, in order to understand the Occupy Movement, and its rebellion
against elite control of democratic institutions and economic
organizations, it is important to examine how organizations and
institutions become rigid oligarchies in the first place. In light of
Michels’ “iron law of oligarchy” and Gilens’ and Page’s research on
oligarchies, we urge that anarchist principles, ironically, be examined
as a possible counter to oligarchic rule, that is, if democratic
institutions are to be salvaged. As such, policy recommendations via
anarchic social justice must be discussed in relation to meeting the
needs of self-determining people and the challenges awaiting them in the
twenty-first century. This is because democratic governance has been
thoroughly undermined by elite domination and why the Occupy Movement
erupted to demand democratic accountability, not just in governance but
in economic matters as well.<br />
<br />
<strong>Becoming Oligarchy</strong><br />
<br />
Michels’ “iron law of oligarchy” refers to organizations and
institutions, specifically the left-wing parties of Western Europe in
the pre-World War I era, which called for egalitarian reforms through
mass democracy and popular governance. Yet, as Michels observed, these
same democratically minded organizations and institutions could not
resist the tendency to become de facto oligarchies. In spite of their
revolutionary identities and democratic structures, the labor parties of
Michels’ era were dominated by tightly bound cliques with the intent of
perpetuating their own interests rather than the goals of equality and
self-rule. The irony, Michels noted, was that in a democratic
organization like the German Social-Democratic Party (SPD) to which
Michels belonged at the time, only a few people in executive positions
actually held power and decision-making privileges. This phenomenon also
applied to traditional conservative parties according to Michels.
Nevertheless, the “leaders” of the SPD valued their own elite status and
social-mobility more than any commitment to the goal of emancipating
Germany’s “industrial proletariat,” from exploitation. Inevitably, the
SPD’s actual policies became increasingly conservative, often siding
with the imperial authorities of Wilhelmian Germany. Eventually, while
SPD leaders gained constitutional legislative power and public prestige,
they failed to serve the collective will of its mass membership; they
were in fact dominating and directing it for their own ends. Research
today by Gilens and Page only confirm what took place with Michels’
research a century ago.<br />
<br />
Michels concluded that the day-to-day administration of any
large-scale, differentiated bureaucratic organization, such as the SPD,
by the rank-and-file majority was impossible. Given the “incompetence
of the masses,” there was a need for full-time elite professional
leadership to manage and direct others in a hierarchical, top-down
manner. And the rank and file members were not necessarily opposed to
this. In theory, the SPD leaders were subject to control by the
rank-and-file through delegate conferences and membership voting; in
reality, the elite leadership was firmly in command. The simple
organizational need for a division of labor, hierarchy, and specialized
leadership roles meant that control over the top functionaries from
below was “purely fictitious.” Elected leaders had the experience,
skills, and superior knowledge necessary for running the party and
controlling all formal means of communication with its membership,
including the party press. While proclaiming their devotion to the party
program of social democracy, the leaders soon became part of the German
political establishment. The mass membership was unable to provide an
effective counterweight to this entrenched minority of self-serving
party officials who were more committed to internal organizational goals
and their own personal interests than to radical social change on
behalf of their members. Michels believed that these inevitable
oligarchic tendencies were reinforced by a mass predisposition for
depending upon, and even glorifying, the party oligarchs. As Michels
states, “Though it grumbles occasionally, the majority is really
delighted to find persons who will take the trouble to look after its
affairs. In the mass, and even in the organized mass of the labor
parties, there is an immense need for direction and guidance. This need
is accompanied by a genuine cult for the leaders, who are regarded as
heroes.” Thus elites maneuver their way into power and the members
abdicate their participation in self-governance.<br />
<br />
The “iron law of oligarchy” was thus a product of Michels’ own
personal experiences as a frustrated idealist and a disillusioned
social-democrat. His <em>Political Parties</em> was based upon an
empirical study of the SPD and a number of affiliated German trade
unions. Michels observed firsthand that the ordinary members of these
working-class organizations were practically excluded from any
decision-making process within their organizations, either structurally
of by their own indifference. Thus Michels argued that the inherent
tendency of large and complex organizations – including radical or
socialist political parties and labor unions – to develop a mass
membership to provide any effective counterweight to a ruling clique of
leaders, was doomed. Smaller, less complex organizations also manifested
similar tendencies to be controlled by elites as well. Moreover, these
inherent organizational tendencies were strengthened by a mass
psychology of leadership dependency. This analysis made Michels
increasingly skeptical regarding the possibility of democratic
governance, precisely as a result of the general frustration he and
others, such as Vilfredo Pareto and Gaetano Mosca, had with democratic
organizations. Thus one reason why fascism and “elite theory” became
increasingly popular by the twentieth century, and specifically for
Michels, was because oligarchy in democratic institutions became
increasingly embedded. Some have argued that Michels may have formulated
an “iron law of bureaucracy,” mistakenly seeking “democracy in
structures, not in interactions,” and thus ignoring the real difference
between democracies and non-democracies. Nevertheless, the
dissatisfaction of people today with democratic governance, co-opted by
economic elites, has led to massive frustration by the public at large
and thus the emergence of the Occupy Movement.<br />
<br />
The decision of Citizens United by the Supreme Court has only fueled
this burning discontent and that the Supreme Court is coopted by elite
power as well.<br />
<br />
<strong>Why Oligarchy?</strong><br />
<br />
Here are some reasons why oligarchy is deeply embedded in democratic institutions and organizations.<br />
<br />
<em>Reason #1</em>: The classic liberal view of society is based on
the perspective that a collection of individuals and groups is in
essence a free association in which socially defined identities and
roles spontaneously emerge. Throughout the course of a person’s life,
one’s actions and choices are shaped by social roles and statuses. In
every society, certain characteristics such as age, sex, ethnicity,
appearance, division of labor, and social class, have a direct impact on
the allocation of individual roles in society. These assigned roles are
not a random occurrence; they are the outgrowth of deeply embedded
interests and power relations which have been institutionalized. In this
way status can be understood as either ascribed or achieved: ascribed,
meaning it is assigned by tradition, irrespective of individual
initiative; achieved, meaning it is the result of personal
accomplishments and talent. This is the case since achievement is itself
almost always dependent upon arbitrary and antecedent conditions of
custom and class.<br />
<br />
<em>Reason #2</em>: The term “organization” implies the mobilization
of individuals into roles and statuses committed to the performance of
some form of collective behavior. “Organization” also describes the
precisely defined structures of group authority which can be found in
churches, militaries, schools, corporations, political parties,
agencies, and governments. While class structure as an organization is
not usually defined as such, it is, nevertheless, the composite of
people who differ in wealth and social prestige, who then in turn, are
served in a relative fashion by the various institutions. What then
connects these institutions is a “functionally integrated system” built
around networks of communication, interest, power and social class,
which comprise what is known as a “social system” or “social structure.”
The process in which individuals become socialized into their milieu is
determined for the most part by the organizational and institutional
roles which they assume. These roles, generally, are not individually
determined, but are shaped instead, by the very organizations and
institutions in which they are co-opted. In turn, organizations are
determined by their essential interests and minimal requisites of role
performance. More specifically, the essential interests of organizations
are manipulated by the interests of those who have the most power
within the organization to control the outcome to their advantage.<br />
<br />
<em>Reason #3</em>: Individuals are socialized to believe that their
well-being is to avoid conflict and thus secure a place for themselves
within the system based on the system’s own terms. The path to success,
according to Ralf Miliband, is found in conforming to “the values,
prejudices and modes of thought of the world to which entry is sought.”
Those who are skeptical and even question the virtues of the given
organization discover, either painfully or at great personal risk, that
they must conform and adjust to minimal role demands or suffer adverse
consequences. Organizational control, nevertheless, conveys attitudes of
obedience disseminating among subordinates in any organizational
structure within a society. The social norm then becomes the external
and internal force for compliance upon the individual and the pressure
to obey comes not only from the superior or elite but from the
collectivity of subordinates. In this manner pressure for role
fulfillment, then, can be felt vertically from the higher authority that
controls the agenda of role performances, but also horizontally from
similarly situated subordinates who, having internalized the
organizational values of obedience, are as critical as any superior of
departures in role performance. Such departures, being seen as an
unwillingness to carry one’s share of the burden, is perceived as a
violation of essential professional duties, a “letting down” not only of
one’s superiors, but of one’s peers, be they ordinary co-workers,
professional colleagues, or comrades in arms.<br />
<br />
<em>Reason #4</em>: To control the essential structures of role
behavior, as is the case with organizations, is to shape social
consciousness in ways that rational exercises cannot do. Roles, within
organizations, become habit and custom. For persons socialized into
institutional roles, most alternative forms of behavior either violate
their sense of propriety or escape their imagination altogether. They do
not think of themselves as responding to a particular arrangement of
social reality but to the only social reality there is. In this regard
the absolute nature of this social arrangement is not questioned
because, in the words of social theorist J. Peter Euben, “realism
becomes an unargued and implicit conservatism,” and as Sanford Levinson
also argues “the most subtle form of ‘political education’ is the
treating of events and conditions which are in fact amenable to change
as though they were natural events. This is not a question of treating
what is as what ought to be but rather as what has to be.”<br />
<br />
Organizations
and social institutions, nonetheless, are those massive monuments of
society which capture and confine the vision of people, and an
organization’s very existence becomes its own legitimating force. In
economic terms it is a case of supply creating demand. The dominant
organizations in the social system lend the legitimacy of substance and
practice to the established norms which in turn teach and reinforce
adherence to the ongoing social system. What should be recognized is
that the social norms or values are not self-sustaining, self-adaptive
consensual forces; they are mediated through organizations and
institutions, and to the extent that organizations and institutions are
instruments of power in the service of elitist interests. Thus, social
norms themselves are a product of organizational interests and power
relations. This is why oligarchies become imbedded in institutions and
organizations and preclude democratic governance and popular control of
economic resources and accountability.<br />
<br />
Basically, a type of dictatorship emerges in which democratic rule
and economic security are scuttled by oligarchic rule. But the elites,
and their oligarchy, define it as “democratic.” As a result, we get
Occupy.<br />
<br />
<div class="entry">
<li>Parts 2, 3, and 4 to follow.</li>
<li> </li>
<div class="author">
Edward Martin is Professor of Public Policy and
Administration, Graduate Center for Public Policy and Administration at
California State University, Long Beach, and co-author of Savage State:
Welfare Capitalism and Inequality;
Mateo Pimentel lives on the Mexican-US border, writing for many
alternative political newsletters and Web sites. He can be reached at: <a href="mailto:mateo.pimentel@gmail.com">mateo.pimentel@gmail.com</a>. </div>
<div class="author">
<br /></div>
<div class="author">
<a href="http://dissidentvoice.org/author/edwardmartinmateopimentel/">Read other articles by Edward Martin and Mateo Pimentel</a>.</div>
<div class="author">
<br /></div>
<div class="postmeta">
This article was posted on Friday, May 8th, 2015 at 1:45am and is filed under <a href="http://dissidentvoice.org/category/class/" rel="category tag">Classism</a>, <a href="http://dissidentvoice.org/category/democracy/" rel="category tag">Democracy</a>, <a href="http://dissidentvoice.org/category/activism/occupy-movement-activism/" rel="category tag">Occupy movement</a>. </div>
</div>
NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03499454400310101800noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4272948272257156976.post-25882955222677074912016-02-12T13:31:00.000-08:002016-02-12T13:31:24.317-08:00How can we make a "political revolution"?<br />
<br />
<a href="http://socialistworker.org/" id="logo" rel="home" title="Home"><img alt="Home" src="http://socialistworker.org/sites/all/themes/swzen/logo.png" /></a>
<br />
<br />
<h1 class="title headline">
<a href="http://socialistworker.org/2015/11/04/how-can-we-make-a-political-revolution" target="_blank">How can we make a "political revolution"?</a></h1>
<div class="dateline">
November 4, 2015</div>
<div class="dateline">
</div>
<div class="body-introduction">
Bernie Sanders is calling for
revolution on a regular basis during his campaign for the Democratic
Party presidential nomination. But what does he mean by a "political
revolution" and what would it take to actually achieve one? <span class="sw-author">Danny Katch</span>, author of <a href="http://www.haymarketbooks.org/pb/Socialism-Seriously"><em>Socialism...Seriously: A Brief Guide to Human Liberation</em></a>, provides some answers.<br />
<br />
</div>
<div class="body">
<span class="sw image inline-right" style="width: 330px;"><span class="image-330"><img alt="Demonstrations during the Arab Spring revolt against Hosni Mubarak" class="image-330" height="232" src="http://socialistworker.org/sites/default/files/imagecache/330/images/Egypt%20revolution%20with%20banner-1a.jpg" title="Demonstrations during the Arab Spring revolt against Hosni Mubarak" width="330" /></span><span class="caption"> </span></span><br />
<span class="sw image inline-right" style="width: 330px;"><span class="caption">Demonstrations during the Arab Spring revolt against Hosni Mubarak</span></span><br />
<br />
<span class="sw image inline-right" style="width: 330px;"><span class="caption"> </span></span>
<br />
"READY TO start a political revolution?"<br />
<br />
That's the cheerful call to arms greeting visitors to the
presidential campaign home page of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. The
Sanders campaign for the Democratic Party nomination started as a long
shot last spring, but has snowballed into a credible, if still unlikely,
threat to frontrunner Hillary Clinton.<br />
<br />
Clinton had been widely viewed as the only serious candidate, not because she's so appealing to voters, but because of her <a href="https://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/contrib.php?cid=N00000019&cycle=Career">deep connections and support</a> among billionaires, banks and <a href="http://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/257234-clinton-brings-in-most-big-pharma-money-of-2016-field">pharmaceutical companies</a>.<br />
<br />
Sanders, by contrast, has gained a significant following precisely
because so many people are frustrated with a political class that is
obviously in the bag for the 1 Percent--epitomized both by corporate
Democrats like Clinton and by the various Republican lackeys for the
Koch Brothers.<br />
<br />
During the first presidential debate, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/10/13/the-oct-13-democratic-debate-who-said-what-and-what-it-means/">Sanders expressed this mood in radical language</a> not usually heard on network television:<br />
<blockquote>
I believe that the power of Corporate America, the power of Wall Street,
the power of the drug companies, the power of the corporate media is so
great that the only way we really transform America and do the things
that the middle class and working class desperately need is through a
political revolution, when millions of people begin to come together and
stand up and say: Our government is going to work for all of us, not
just a handful of billionaires.
</blockquote>
Whatever Sanders means by revolution--and in fact, it is not so very
revolutionary--his call for radical action is refreshing for many
liberals and progressives who had their expectations systematically
lowered ever since Barack Obama's historic election as the first Black
president in 2008.<br />
<br />
Obama famously promised hope and change, but has spent most of his
time in office lecturing his supporters that they were naïve to think
that change would come any faster than the slow drip of a leaky faucet.<br />
<br />
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -<br />
<br />
OBAMA HAS often cast his presidency as a continuation of the historic fights against slavery and Jim Crow segregation, <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/03/07/remarks-president-50th-anniversary-selma-montgomery-marches">a process he describes as the country's slow evolution</a>
toward "a more perfect union." In fact, those struggles should teach us
the opposite lesson: that history is not a gradual and inevitable march
toward progress, but instead moves in dramatic thrusts forward and
backward.<br />
<br />
Revolutions, far from being impractical pipe dreams, have been one of
the most important methods for moving history decisively forward.<br />
<br />
It was a revolution that won independence from rule by the British
king for the American colonies, and a (limited) democratic form of
government. It was a revolution in Haiti that marked the beginning of
the end of plantation slavery in the Americas. And it was revolutions
across Africa and Asia in the mid-20th century that established that
European colonialism would no longer govern the world.<br />
<br />
Bernie Sanders' call for revolution resonates with many people
because we are living in an era with levels of injustice and inequality
similar to those that in the past have produced revolutions.<br />
<br />
Sanders describes the problems well. "I think it is clear to anyone
who has taken a look at this situation that the rules regarding our
international financial system today are rigged in favor of the wealthy
and the powerful at the expense of everyone else," <a href="http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/32465-sen-bernie-sanders-the-financial-rules-are-rigged-to-favor-the-1">he told Amy Goodman of <i>Democracy Now!</i></a>
"Today, 85 of the wealthiest people in this world own more wealth than
the bottom half of the world's population, over 3 billion people."<br />
<br />
In a <a href="http://www.rawstory.com/2015/10/sanders-blasts-broken-system-kids-busted-for-pot-while-economy-wrecking-ceos-are-too-big-to-jail/">discussion with students at William Penn University</a>
in Iowa, he identified a different kind of injustice: "You got kids who
have police records in this country for possessing a small amount of
marijuana. Does any major CEO of a Wall Street financial institution,
whose greed and recklessness and illegal behavior destroyed this
economy, resulted in the loss of millions of jobs, people lost their
homes, lost their life savings. Does any one of those guys have a
criminal record?"<br />
<br />
Sanders is quieter about the injustices committed by the U.S. ruling
class around the world. But these are just as vital to how the 1 Percent
wields its power.<br />
<br />
For example, the U.S. military has more bombs than every other
military in the world combined. It rains those bombs down at will on
other countries--supposedly to punish terrorists and other bad guys--but
faces <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/24/opinion/doctors-without-hospitals.html">no consequences when it commits obvious war crimes</a> like bombing a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Afghanistan.<br />
<br />
Or consider the double standard of national borders: U.S. traders can
enrich themselves by investing in--or destroying--currencies and
commodities all over the world, but people in those countries aren't
allowed to come to the U.S. in search of a livelihood to replace the one
destroyed by America's financial elite.<br />
<br />
Our political system is supposed to be a democracy, which prevents domination by a tiny group of elites. But according to a <a href="http://www.commondreams.org/views/2014/04/14/us-oligarchy-not-democracy-says-scientific-study">widely discussed academic study last year by professors Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page</a>,
while many political scientists describe the U.S. as a "majoritarian
democracy, our analyses suggest that majorities of the American public
actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts."<br />
<br />
In other words, as Sanders likes to say, the system is rigged.<br />
<br />
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -<br />
<br />
THE RIGGING takes place in part via legalized bribery otherwise known
as corporate lobbying and campaign contributions that have only gotten
larger since the U.S. Supreme Court's outrageous <i>Citizens United</i> decision lifted most restrictions on political donations in the name of protecting "free speech" of corporations and the rich.<br />
<br />
Another way in which the deck of U.S. politics is stacked is the
dominance of two political parties, both of which are backed by the 1
Percent. For years, <a href="http://www.gallup.com/poll/177284/americans-continue-say-third-political-party-needed.aspx">a majority of Americans have favored having a strong third party</a>,
according to pinion polls, but the Republicans and Democrats have
remained in exclusive control, forcing many progressive movements to
feel as if they have no choice but to support the rotten compromises of
the Democrats in order to prevent the alternative--rule by the
greater-evil Republicans.<br />
<br />
By choosing to run as a Democrat and promising that he will support
Hillary Clinton if and when he loses the presidential primary, Sanders
is actually contributing to the continuation of the two-party shell
game. That's one of the ways in which is "political revolution" is
actually pretty limited.<br />
<br />
Not coincidentally, the content of Sanders' call for revolution falls
far short of what would be necessary to really take on corporate power.
When he was asked to clarify what he meant by "political revolution"
during the Democratic candidates' debate in October, Sanders talked
about <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/14/us/politics/democratic-debate-transcript.html">increasing voter turnout and raising public consciousness</a>. That certainly isn't enough to challenge a rigged system controlled by the 1 Percent.<br />
<br />
Sanders isn't the first politician to talk about revolution to
emphasize his outsider status and bold ideas--although these days the
"R" word is more likely to be invoked by Tea Party Republicans looking
to fire up their reactionary base.<br />
<br />
But an actual political revolution isn't rhetoric, but a real
event--relatively rare, but appearing repeatedly through history on
every continent. It was defined <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1930/hrr/ch00.htm">memorably and beautifully by the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky</a>:<br />
<blockquote>
The most indubitable feature of a revolution is the direct interference
of the masses in historical events. In ordinary times the state, be it
monarchical or democratic, elevates itself above the nation, and history
is made by specialists in that line of business--kings, ministers,
bureaucrats, parliamentarians, journalists.</blockquote>
<blockquote>
But at those crucial moments when the old order becomes no longer
endurable to the masses, they break over the barriers excluding them
from the political arena, sweep aside their traditional representatives,
and create by their own interference the initial groundwork for a new
régime. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
Whether this is good or bad we leave to the judgment of moralists. We
ourselves will take the facts as they are given by the objective course
of development. The history of a revolution is for us first of all a
history of the forcible entrance of the masses into the realm of
rulership over their own destiny.
</blockquote>
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -<br />
<br />
THERE HAVE been many more revolutionary upheavals after the Russian
Revolution of 1917, up to the current day and the wave of revolts across
the Middle East and North Africa beginning in 2011 known as the Arab
Spring.<br />
<br />
Egypt saw the largest of these revolutions, in which millions of
people took to the streets for weeks to fight off police and hired thugs
and overthrow the 30-year reign of the U.S.-backed dictator Hosni
Mubarak.<br />
<br />
As the revolutionary wave spread to neighboring countries,
longstanding divisions and repressive traditions were suddenly examined
in a new light as ordinary people were thrust into a situation in which
their ideas mattered. Here is how the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/17/world/middleeast/17yemen.html"><i>New York Times</i> described a center of the revolution in Yemen</a>:<br />
<blockquote>
In the sprawling tent city outside Sana University, rival tribesmen have
forsworn their vendettas to sit, eat and dance together. College
students talk to Zaydi rebels from the north, and discover they are not,
in fact, the devils portrayed in government newspapers. Women who have
spent their lives indoors give impassioned speeches to amazed crowds.
Four daily newspapers are now published in "Change Square," as it is
called, and about 20 weeklies.
</blockquote>
Scenes like this bring to mind a famous quote attributed to the
Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin: "There are decades where nothing
happens; and there are weeks where decades happen."<br />
<br />
Other regions of the world have also seen dramatic political changes that don't fit the classical model of a revolution.<br />
<br />
Waves of nationwide protests have led to the election of number of
left-wing governments in South America, most famously in Venezuela,
where millions of working people repeatedly took to the streets to
defend the government of Hugo Chávez--and in the process, pushed his
government to fight more broadly for their interests.<br />
<br />
In Greece, years of general strikes and protests led to the dramatic
growth of the radical left party SYRIZA, which won office earlier this
year on a promise to end the horrible spending cuts imposed by the
European Union.<br />
<br />
These examples have more than one lesson. They show us that
revolution and radical change are not just chapters in history books,
but if anything are beginning to occur more regularly as our world
becomes a more economically and ecologically more unstable place. But
they also show the limitations of replacing unjust political regimes
without changing the underlying capitalist order that put those regimes
in power.<br />
<br />
The rebellions of the Arab Spring have been dealt <a href="http://socialistworker.org/2014/02/20/what-remains-of-the-arab-spring">devastating setbacks by coups, civil wars and barbaric repression</a>. In Greece, the European Union threatened to plunge the country into financial catastrophe, and the SYRIZA leadership <a href="http://socialistworker.org/2015/09/18/greece-elections-and-the-left-challenge">chose to capitulate to another round of economic blackmail</a>. In Venezuela, <a href="http://socialistworker.org/2015/05/26/chavismo-on-the-horns-of-a-dil">Chávez's successor Nicolás Maduro is struggling to maintain the social programs</a> that reduced poverty after a global decline in oil prices hammered the country's main export.<br />
<br />
One lesson we <i>shouldn't</i> take from these situations is that
revolution isn't possible. What's needed is a thoroughgoing revolution,
more so than Bernie Sanders envisions--one that doesn't just replace the
political leaders or even whole regimes carrying out unjust policies,
but that replaces the unjust economic system underlying them.<br />
<br />
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -<br />
<br />
IF A political revolution is defined by the replacement of a
political regime, a social revolution means replacing a societal order
that is the foundation for that regime.<br />
<br />
After all, as Sanders says, we are not just ruled by the candidates
we elect to the White House and Congress, but by "the power of corporate
America, the power of Wall Street, the power of the drug companies, the
power of the corporate media"--as well as the tremendous and unchecked
power of the military and police.<br />
<br />
Their power goes far beyond having the wealth to lobby government
officials. They own the main resources of society and control how they
are used. The only way to end that control is to put those resources in
the hands of all of us, to be decided on democratically.<br />
<br />
Just as revolutions in 17th and 18th century Europe brought about the
end of the rule of kings and dukes and began a new era of a world run
by factory owners and banks, a social revolution today could replace the
reign of capitalism and begin a new era of self-rule for the majority.<br />
<br />
That's the meaning of socialism, and it can only come about through
the process of revolution: both because the 1 Percent won't simply give
up control through a democratic vote, and because it's only by going
through the profound change of ideas produced in places like Change
Square in Yemen that the vast majority of people in society, the working
class, can equip themselves to be able to run society for ourselves.<br />
<br />
If society were based on the interests not of the 1 Percent, but all
of us, we could easily find the resources for the best of Sanders'
proposals like free college tuition and government-funded health care,
and much more besides.<br />
<br />
We could also take the trillions of dollars hoarded by corporations
and wasted by the military to immediately end homelessness and hunger
around the world, open borders for people to live where they choose, and
save our children from ecological catastrophe by abolishing the fossil
fuel industry and shifting to renewable energy sources.<br />
<br />
Bernie Sanders' call for political revolution is welcome at a time
when we urgently need radical change, but what does it mean to start
working today for an actual revolution?<br />
<br />
It means joining the causes that are motivating people to fight back,
like raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour and forcing police
officers to follow the laws they are supposed to enforce. It also means
trying to organize the most farsighted activists who see the need for a
longer-term fight for socialism.<br />
<br />
In the U.S., part of that fight is building organizations that are
independent of the Democratic Party, including its left faces like
Sanders--just as one of the key steps forward in Venezuela, Greece and
elsewhere has been the emergence of new parties and formations that
broke the grip of the old corrupt rulers.<br />
<br />
Developing strong movements independent of our rigged political
system will be a key step toward making a real "political revolution" in
the U.S.<br />
</div>
NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03499454400310101800noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4272948272257156976.post-25446499114424908952016-02-11T17:32:00.000-08:002016-02-11T17:32:19.224-08:00You Say You Want a Revolution<h2>
<span style="font-size: x-large; font-weight: normal;"><i>The Atlantic</i></span></h2>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/02/you-say-you-want-a-revolution/462312/" target="_blank">You Say You Want a Revolution</a></span></h2>
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If Bernie Sanders is serious about a political transformation in America, he needs a better plan.</div>
<ul class="metadata" style="background-color: white; font-family: Rajdhani, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 0.72222rem; letter-spacing: 2px; list-style-type: none; margin: 0px; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; text-transform: uppercase;"><b>
<li class="byline" style="display: inline-block;"><a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/author/eric-liu/" style="color: #ec1b23; text-decoration: none;" title="Eric Liu">ERIC LIU</a></li>
</b></ul>
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<img height="426" itemprop="image" src="http://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/mt/2016/02/AP_580608966194/lead_960.jpg?1455165354" width="640" /></div>
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If there’s one thing that fires up Bernie Sanders supporters—and makes his detractors roll their eyes—it’s his call for a “political revolution.” To his base, it’s the very point of his anti-establishment, anti-elite candidacy. To his critics, it’s the very embodiment of his campaign’s naïve impracticality and vagueness.</div>
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But now that voters in Iowa and New Hampshire have spoken, it’s time to take the idea of political revolution more seriously—more seriously, indeed, than Sanders <a data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'0',r'462312'" href="http://www.politico.com/story/2015/11/bernie-sanders-democratic-debate-iowa-215815" style="color: #458cd5; text-decoration: none;">himself</a> appears to have. It’s time to ask: What exactly would it take?</div>
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It starts with Congress. And here it’s instructive to compare Sanders and Donald Trump. Both rely on broad, satisfying refrains of “We’re gonna”: We’re gonna break up the big banks. We’re gonna make Mexico build the wall. We’re gonna end the rule of Wall Street billionaires. We’re gonna make China stop ripping us off.</div>
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The difference is, Trump’s refrains are more plausible. That’s because today’s Congress is already willing to enact many of his proposals, whether repeal of Obamacare or severe restrictions on immigration. And if Trump became president, the 115th Congress would very likely be more conservative than the 114th.</div>
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For Sanders to deliver on his “We’re gonna” pledges, he needs an entirely different Congress. How to get it? Thus far, Sanders has laid out a theory of action that is basically, “If I come, they will build it.” That is, if he electrifies enough voters to win, then presumably those voters will have upended Congress as well. He’s banking on an electoral flood tide à la 1980, 1964, or 1932.</div>
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That’s possible, but it’s not a plan. If he’s serious about political revolution, the first priority for Sanders now should be to cultivate a crop of Democratic candidates who can oust Republican incumbents. House Democrats, at their lowest numbers since 1947, need 30 seats to regain a majority. If Sanders launched a “Bernie’s 30” effort, to persuade his formidable base of small donors to give money and time to a slate of candidates who can win a targeted set of seats now held by the GOP, that would help effect the actual institutional change his presidency would depend on.</div>
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A second step for a true revolution would be a common policy agenda for all these candidates. Here he could take a page from Newt Gingrich’s playbook and issue a progressive Contract With America that prioritizes 10 easy-to-digest legislative goals (Wall Street reform, campaign reform, single-payer health care, and so forth). Historians and commentators differ on how much the Contract truly caused the tectonic 1994 GOP takeover. But it did nationalize, and standardize, congressional campaigns in a way that Sanders would need to do.</div>
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Third, Sanders should also take a page from the Obama 2008 playbook. That campaign organized young people more systematically than any presidential campaign in history. Across the country, it held “Camp Obama” trainings, in which young people taught each other Marshall Ganz’s story-centered methods of community organizing. Sanders has the young people; now he needs the machinery to amplify their force.</div>
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Fourth, Sanders would have to learn from Obama 2008 how to catalyze culture makers. Every presidential campaign knows enough now to enlist celebrity musicians or artists. But Sanders could invite artists from all around the country, famous or not, to create work that spreads the message of his campaign. Culture shapes norms: about inequality, racism, violence. And culture that isn’t made by the campaign but by the people packs a punch.</div>
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Fifth, Sanders would have to link up to other organic movements that are arising in parallel with his own campaign. The Democracy Awakening coalition, led by the NAACP and Public Citizen with dozens of other progressive organizations, for example, is planning a national rally in Washington for this spring. But Sanders should look beyond obviously progressive movements. If he wants a revolution, he needs also to invite in the segment of Trump supporters who aren’t racist xenophobes but who simply feel left behind by a changing country. That would be revolutionary.</div>
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Sixth, the Sanders campaign should study the Tea Party closely and learn from it. It’s too easy for progressives to dismiss the Tea Party as a creation of the Koch brothers. The more complex and instructive reality is that, especially early on, there were many thousands of Americans self-organizing on conference calls and Facebook and in person. What was their leadership structure? How did they communicate? What lessons do their grassroots leaders have about dealing with the party establishment?</div>
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Seventh, Sanders should be building a web of city leaders—elected and not—who will push policies in sync with his national agenda. Cities are increasingly the locus of civic innovation, whether on the sharing economy or living wages or criminal-justice reform. A true political revolution would activate citizens in every city of scale to provide the foundation from which federal reforms could arise.</div>
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Of course, Hillary Clinton could adopt some of these strategies, too. But her disadvantage is that she does not have many young voters. More crucially, she does not seek transformational change. The only other candidate who wants such change, Trump, sees his voters as an audience, as customers, as fans. Not so much as citizens. He loves them the way Il Duce loved his people. He wants to exercise power in their name, not to empower them to shape their own futures.</div>
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Which brings me back to the Sanders opportunity—and what I think of as an American opportunity. I supported Obama in 2008, and I’ve supported Clinton this time. But I am genuinely excited about the energy Sanders has activated, and I believe it’s good for the country if that energy gets converted to productive civic action.</div>
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So the message now to Bernie Sanders from Americans of every stripe should be this: </div>
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You say you want a revolution? Help us make one.</div>
NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03499454400310101800noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4272948272257156976.post-65074348895587437432015-12-30T18:08:00.000-08:002015-12-30T18:08:52.010-08:00Why America is Moving Left<h2>
<span style="font-size: x-large;">The Atlantic</span></h2>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/01/why-america-is-moving-left/419112/" target="_blank">Why America Is Moving Left</a></span></h2>
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<b>Republicans may have a lock on Congress and the nation’s statehouses—and could well win the presidency—but the liberal era ushered in by Barack Obama is only just beginning.</b></div>
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<span class="smallcaps" style="font-variant: small-caps;">Over roughly the past 18 months,</span> the following events have transfixed the nation.</div>
In July 2014, Eric Garner, an African American man reportedly selling loose cigarettes illegally, was choked to death by a New York City policeman.<br />
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That August, a white police officer, Darren Wilson, shot and killed an African American teenager, Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri. For close to two weeks, protesters battled police clad in military gear. Missouri’s governor said the city looked like a war zone.<br />
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In December, an African American man with a criminal record avenged Garner’s and Brown’s deaths by murdering two New York City police officers. At the officers’ funerals, hundreds of police turned their backs on New York’s liberal mayor, Bill de Blasio.<br />
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In April 2015 another young African American man, Freddie Gray, died in police custody, in Baltimore. In the chaos that followed, 200 businesses were destroyed, 113 police officers were injured, and 486 people were arrested. To avoid further violence, a game between the Baltimore Orioles and the Chicago White Sox was postponed twice, then played in an empty stadium with police sirens audible in the distance.<br />
<figure class="left" style="clear: left; float: left; margin: 1em 1em 1em 0px; max-width: 281px; padding: 10px 0px; position: relative; width: 281px;"><picture style="display: block; height: 0px; overflow: hidden; padding-bottom: 374.984px; position: relative; width: 281px;"><img alt="" class=" lazyloaded" data-src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2015/12/0116_Cover_RGB/20bfb476c.jpg" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2015/12/0116_Cover_RGB/20bfb476c.jpg" style="border: 0px; height: 374.984px; left: 0px; max-width: 100%; opacity: 1; position: absolute; top: 0px; transition: opacity 300ms; vertical-align: middle; width: 281px;" /></picture></figure>Then, in July, activists with Black Lives Matter, a movement that had gained national attention after Brown’s death, disrupted speeches by two Democratic presidential candidates in Phoenix, Arizona. As former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley fidgeted onstage, protesters chanted, “If I die in police custody, avenge my death! By any means necessary!” and “If I die in police custody, burn everything down!” When O’Malley responded, “Black lives matter, white lives matter, all lives matter,” the crowd booed loudly. Later that day, O’Malley apologized. Donald Trump, who had ascended to first place in the race for the Republican presidential nomination while promising to represent the “silent majority,” called O’Malley “a disgusting little weak, pathetic baby.”<br />
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Anyone familiar with American history can hear the echoes. The phrase <i>by any means necessary</i> was popularized by Malcolm X in a June 1964 speech in Upper Manhattan. In the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in April 1968, Baltimore burned, as many cities did amid the racial violence that broke out every spring and summer from 1964 to 1969. In November 1969, in a speech from the Oval Office, Richard Nixon uttered the phrase <i>silent majority</i>. It soon became shorthand for those white Americans who, shaken by crime and appalled by radicalism, turned against the Democratic Party in the ’60s and ’70s. For Americans with an ear for historical parallels, the return of that era’s phrases and images suggests that a powerful conservative backlash is headed our way.<br />
<br /></section><div class="ad-boxinjector-wrapper" style="background-color: white; clear: both; font-family: 'Lyon Text', Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 30.0001px; text-align: center;">
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<section id="article-section-2" style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Lyon Text', Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 30.0001px; margin: 0px auto; max-width: 630px; padding-right: 330px; width: 630px;">At least, that was my thesis when I set out to write this essay. I came of age in the ’80s and ’90s, when the backlash against ’60s liberalism still struck terror into Democratic hearts. I watched as Ronald Reagan moved the country hard to the right, and as Bill Clinton made his peace with this new political reality by assuring white America that his party would fight crime mercilessly. Seeing this year’s Democratic candidates crumple before Black Lives Matter and shed Clinton’s ideological caution as they stampeded to the left, I imagined the country must be preparing for a vast conservative reaction.<br />
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But I was wrong. The more I examined the evidence, the more I realized that the current moment looks like a mirror image of the late ’60s and early ’70s. The resemblances are clear, but their political significance has been turned upside down. There is a backlash against the liberalism of the Obama era. But it is louder than it is strong. Instead of turning right, the country as a whole is still moving to the left.<br />
<aside class="pullquote instapaper_ignore" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-top-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); border-top-style: solid; border-top-width: 10px; font-family: 'Lyon Display', Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 2rem; font-weight: bold; line-height: 1.05556; margin: 40px 0px; padding: 25px 0px 20px;">Bush destroyed centrist Democrats intellectually, by making it impossible for them to credibly critique liberalism from the right.</aside>That doesn’t mean the Republicans won’t retain strength in the nation’s statehouses and in Congress. It doesn’t mean a Republican won’t sooner or later claim the White House. It means that on domestic policy—foreign policy is following a different trajectory, as it often does—the terms of the national debate will continue tilting to the left. The next Democratic president will be more liberal than Barack Obama. The next Republican president will be more liberal than George W. Bush.</section><div class="ad-boxinjector-wrapper" style="background-color: white; clear: both; font-family: 'Lyon Text', Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 30.0001px; text-align: center;">
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<section id="article-section-3" style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Lyon Text', Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 30.0001px; margin: 0px auto; max-width: 630px; padding-right: 330px; width: 630px;">In the late ’60s and ’70s, amid left-wing militancy and racial strife, a liberal era ended. Today, amid left-wing militancy and racial strife, a liberal era is only just beginning.<br />
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<span class="smallcaps" style="font-variant: small-caps;">Understanding why requires </span>understanding why the Democratic Party—and more important, the country at large—is becoming more liberal.</div>
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The story of the Democratic Party’s journey leftward has two chapters. The first is about the presidency of George W. Bush. Before Bush, unapologetic liberalism was not the Democratic Party’s dominant creed. The party had a strong centrist wing, anchored in Congress by white southerners such as Tennessee Senator Al Gore, who had supported much of Ronald Reagan’s defense buildup, and Georgia Senator Sam Nunn, who had stymied Bill Clinton’s push for gays in the military. For intellectual guidance, centrist Democrats looked to the Democratic Leadership Council, which opposed raising the minimum wage; to <i>The New Republic</i> (a magazine I edited in the early 2000s), which attacked affirmative action and <i>Roe v. Wade</i>; and to the <i>Washington Monthly</i>, which proposed means-testing Social Security.<br />
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Centrist Democrats believed that Reagan, for all his faults, had gotten some big things right. The Soviet Union had been evil. Taxes had been too high. Excessive regulation had squelched economic growth. The courts had been too permissive of crime. Until Democrats acknowledged these things, the centrists believed, they would neither win the presidency nor deserve to. In the late 1980s and the 1990s, an influential community of Democratic-aligned politicians, strategists, journalists, and wonks believed that critiquing liberalism from the right was morally and politically necessary.</section><div class="ad-boxinjector-wrapper" style="background-color: white; clear: both; font-family: 'Lyon Text', Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 30.0001px; text-align: center;">
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<section id="article-section-4" style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Lyon Text', Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 30.0001px; margin: 0px auto; max-width: 630px; padding-right: 330px; width: 630px;">George W. Bush wiped this community out. Partly, he did so by rooting the GOP more firmly in the South—Reagan’s political base had been in the West—aiding the slow-motion extinction of white southern Democrats that had begun when the party embraced civil rights. But Bush also destroyed centrist Democrats intellectually, by making it impossible for them to credibly critique liberalism from the right.<br />
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In the late 1980s and the 1990s, centrist Democrats had argued that Reagan’s decisions to cut the top income-tax rate from 70 percent to 50 percent and to loosen government regulation had spurred economic growth. When Bush cut the top rate to 35 percent in 2001 and further weakened regulation, however, inequality and the deficit grew, but the economy barely did—and then the financial system crashed. In the late ’80s and the ’90s, centrist Democrats had also argued that Reagan’s decision to boost defense spending and aid the Afghan mujahideen had helped topple the Soviet empire. But in 2003, when Bush invaded Iraq, he sparked the greatest foreign-policy catastrophe since Vietnam.<br />
<br /></section><figure class="full-width" style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Lyon Text', Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 30.0001px; margin: 0px auto 0px calc(50% - 480px); max-width: 960px; padding: 10px 0px; position: relative; width: 960px;"><picture style="display: block; height: 0px; overflow: hidden; padding-bottom: 639.984px; position: relative; width: 960px;"><img alt="" class=" lazyloaded" data-src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2015/12/WEL_Beinart_Occupy/877e10fec.jpg" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2015/12/WEL_Beinart_Occupy/877e10fec.jpg" style="border: 0px; height: 639.984px; left: 0px; max-width: 100%; opacity: 1; position: absolute; top: 0px; transition: opacity 300ms; vertical-align: middle; width: 960px;" /></picture><figcaption class="caption" style="font-family: 'Proxima Nova', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 0.77778rem; line-height: 1.28571; padding-top: 8px;">The Occupy movement </figcaption><figcaption class="caption" style="font-family: 'Proxima Nova', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 0.77778rem; line-height: 1.28571; padding-top: 8px;"><br /></figcaption><figcaption class="caption" style="font-family: 'Proxima Nova', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 0.77778rem; line-height: 1.28571; padding-top: 8px;"> Occupy may have burned out, but it injected economic inequality into the American political debate. (Associated Press)</figcaption></figure><section id="article-section-5" style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Lyon Text', Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 30.0001px; margin: 0px auto; max-width: 630px; padding-right: 330px; width: 630px;"><br />
If the lesson of the Reagan era had been that Democrats should give a Republican president his due, the lesson of the Bush era was that doing so brought disaster. In the Senate, Bush’s 2001 tax cut passed with 12 Democratic votes; the Iraq War was authorized with 29. As the calamitous consequences of these votes became clear, the revolt against them destroyed the Democratic Party’s centrist wing. “What I want to know,” declared an obscure Vermont governor named Howard Dean in February 2003, “is why in the world the Democratic Party leadership is supporting the president’s unilateral attack on Iraq. What I want to know is, why are Democratic Party leaders supporting tax cuts?” By year’s end, Dean—running for president against a host of Washington Democrats who had supported the war—was the clear front-runner for his party’s nomination.<br />
<br /></section><div class="ad-boxinjector-wrapper" style="background-color: white; clear: both; font-family: 'Lyon Text', Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 30.0001px; text-align: center;">
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<section id="article-section-6" style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Lyon Text', Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 30.0001px; margin: 0px auto; max-width: 630px; padding-right: 330px; width: 630px;">With the Dean campaign came an intellectual revolution inside the Democratic Party. His insurgency helped propel <i>Daily Kos</i>, a group blog dedicated to stiffening the liberal spine. It energized the progressive activist group MoveOn. It also coincided with Paul Krugman’s emergence as America’s most influential liberal columnist and Jon Stewart’s emergence as America’s most influential liberal television personality. In 2003, MSNBC hired Keith Olbermann and soon became a passionately liberal network. In 2004, <i>The New Republic</i> apologized for having supported the Iraq War. In 2005, <i>The Huffington Post</i> was born as a liberal alternative to the <i>Drudge Report</i>. In 2006, Joe Lieberman, the Democratic Party’s most outspoken hawk, lost his Democratic Senate primary and became an Independent. In 2011, the Democratic Leadership Council—having lost its influence years earlier—closed its doors.<br />
By the time Barack Obama defeated Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, in part because of her support for the Iraq War, the mood inside the party had fundamentally changed. Whereas the party’s most respected thinkers had once urged Democrats to critique liberal orthodoxy, they now criticized Democrats for not defending that orthodoxy fiercely enough. The presidency of George W. Bush had made Democrats unapologetically liberal, and the presidency of Barack Obama was the most tangible result.<br />
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<span class="smallcaps" style="font-variant: small-caps;">But that’s only half the story.</span> Because if George W. Bush’s failures pushed the Democratic Party to the left, Barack Obama’s have pushed it even further. If Bush was responsible for the liberal infrastructure that helped elect Obama, Obama has now inadvertently contributed to the creation of two movements—Occupy and Black Lives Matter—dedicated to the proposition that even the liberalism he espouses is not left-wing enough.</div>
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Given the militant opposition Obama faced from Republicans in Congress, it’s unclear whether he could have used the financial crisis to dramatically curtail Wall Street’s power. What is clear is that he did not. Thus, less than three years after the election of a president who had inspired them like no other, young activists looked around at a country whose people were still suffering, and whose financial titans were still dominant. In response, they created Occupy Wall Street.<br />
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When academics from the City University of New York went to Zuccotti Park to study the people who had taken it over, they found something striking: 40 percent of the Occupy activists had worked on the 2008 presidential campaign, mostly for Obama. Many of them had hoped that, as president, he would bring fundamental change. Now the collapse of that hope had led them to challenge Wall Street directly. “Disenchantment with Obama was a driver of the Occupy movement for many of the young people who participated,” noted the <span class="smallcaps" style="font-variant: small-caps;">CUNY</span>researchers. In his book on the movement, <i>Occupy Nation</i>, the Columbia University sociologist Todd Gitlin quotes Jeremy Varon, a close observer of Occupy who teaches at the New School for Social Research, as saying, “This is the Obama generation declaring their independence from his administration. We thought his voice was ours. Now we know we have to speak for ourselves.”<br />
<br /></section><div class="ad-boxinjector-wrapper" style="background-color: white; clear: both; font-family: 'Lyon Text', Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 30.0001px; text-align: center;">
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<section id="article-section-8" style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Lyon Text', Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 30.0001px; margin: 0px auto; max-width: 630px; padding-right: 330px; width: 630px;">For a brief period, Occupy captured the nation’s attention. In December 2011, Gitlin notes, the movement had 143 chapters in California alone. Then it fizzled. But as the political scientist Frances Fox Piven has written, “The great protest movements of history … did not expand in the shape of a simple rising arc of popular defiance. Rather, they began in a particular place, sputtered and subsided, only to re-emerge elsewhere in perhaps a different form, influenced by local particularities of circumstance and culture.”<br />
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That’s what happened to Occupy. The movement may have burned out, but it injected economic inequality into the American political debate. (In the weeks following the takeover of Zuccotti Park, media references to the subject rose fivefold.) The same anger that sparked Occupy—directed not merely at Wall Street but at the Democratic Party elites who coddled it—fueled Bill de Blasio’s election and Elizabeth Warren’s rise to national prominence. And without Occupy, it’s impossible to understand why a curmudgeonly Democratic Socialist from Vermont is seriously challenging Hillary Clinton in the early primary states. The day Bernie Sanders announced his candidacy, a group of Occupy veterans offered their endorsement. In the words of one former Occupy activist, Stan Williams, “People who are involved in Occupy are leading the biggest group for Bernie Sanders. Our fingers are all over this.”<br />
<br /></section><div class="ad-boxinjector-wrapper" style="background-color: white; clear: both; font-family: 'Lyon Text', Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 30.0001px; text-align: center;">
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<section id="article-section-9" style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Lyon Text', Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 30.0001px; margin: 0px auto; max-width: 630px; padding-right: 330px; width: 630px;">Arguably more significant than the Sanders campaign itself is the way Democratic elites have responded to it. In the late 1980s and the ’90s, they would have savaged him. For the Democratic Leadership Council, which sought to make the party more business-friendly, an avowed Socialist would have been the perfect foil. Today, in a Democratic Party whose guiding ethos is “no enemies to the left,” Sanders has met with little ideological resistance. That’s true not only among intellectuals and activists but among many donors. Journalists often assume that Democrats who write big checks oppose a progressive agenda, at least when it comes to economics. And some do. But as John Judis has reported in<i>National Journal</i>, the Democracy Alliance, the party’s most influential donor club, which includes mega-funders such as George Soros and Tom Steyer, has itself shifted leftward during the Obama years. In 2014, it gave Warren a rapturous welcome when she spoke at the group’s annual winter meeting. Last spring it announced that it was making economic inequality its top priority.<br />
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All of this has shaped the Clinton campaign’s response to Sanders. At the first Democratic debate, she noted that, unlike him, she favors “rein[ing] in the excesses of capitalism” rather than abandoning it altogether. But the only specific policy difference she highlighted was gun control, on which she attacked him from the left.<br />
<br /></section><figure class="full-width" style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Lyon Text', Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 30.0001px; margin: 0px auto 0px calc(50% - 480px); max-width: 960px; padding: 10px 0px; position: relative; width: 960px;"><picture style="display: block; height: 0px; overflow: hidden; padding-bottom: 660px; position: relative; width: 960px;"><img alt="" class=" lazyloaded" data-src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2015/12/WEL_Beinart_Warren/606b634e7.jpg" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2015/12/WEL_Beinart_Warren/606b634e7.jpg" style="border: 0px; height: 660px; left: 0px; max-width: 100%; opacity: 1; position: absolute; top: 0px; transition: opacity 300ms; vertical-align: middle; width: 960px;" /></picture><figcaption class="caption" style="font-family: 'Proxima Nova', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 0.77778rem; line-height: 1.28571; padding-top: 8px;">The same anger that sparked Occupy—not only at Wall Street but at the Democratic Party elites who coddled it—fueled Elizabeth Warren’s rise to prominence. (Jonathan Ernst / Reuters / Corbis)</figcaption></figure><section id="article-section-10" style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Lyon Text', Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 30.0001px; margin: 0px auto; max-width: 630px; padding-right: 330px; width: 630px;">Moreover, the Occupy-Warren-Sanders axis has influenced Clinton’s own economic agenda, which is significantly further left than the one she ran on in 2008. She has called for tougher regulation of the financial industry, mused about raising Social Security taxes on the wealthy (something she opposed in 2008), and criticized the Trans-Pacific Partnership (a trade agreement she once gushed about). Overall, <i>Vox</i>’s Matthew Yglesias has written, Clinton appears “less inclined to favor a market-oriented approach than a left-wing approach, a real change from the past quarter century of Democratic Party economic policymaking.” Her “move to the left,” notes Kira Lerner of <i>ThinkProgress</i>, “distances her policies from those of her husband and Obama.”<br />
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<span class="smallcaps" style="font-variant: small-caps;">The same dynamic </span>is playing out on criminal justice and race. Disillusioned by Obama, activists are pushing left. And they’re finding that Clinton and the rest of the party Establishment are happy to go along.</div>
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If Occupy is one of Obama’s unplanned legacies, Black Lives Matter is another. The movement, which began when a jury acquitted George Zimmerman of the murder of Trayvon Martin in 2013 and exploded in 2014 after the death of Michael Brown, has multiple roots. It’s a response to a decades-long rise in incarceration rates and to a spate of police killings, some caught on video.<br />
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But it’s also an expression of disillusion with Obama. State violence against African Americans is nothing new. Yet the fact that it continued when an African American was ostensibly <i>running</i> the state convinced young African American activists that Establishment liberals, even black ones, would not, of their own accord, bring structural change. Only direct action could force their hand.<br />
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“Black Lives Matter developed in the wake of the failure of the Obama administration,” argues the Cornell sociologist Travis Gosa, a co-editor of <i>The Hip Hop & Obama Reader</i>. “Black Lives Matter is the voice of a Millennial generation that’s been sold a bad bill of goods.” This new generation of activists, writes Brittney Cooper, a Rutgers University professor of Africana studies and women’s-and-gender studies, “will not invest in a nation-state project that hands them black presidents alongside dead unarmed black boys in the street.” And they take a dim view of veteran activists, such as Al Sharpton, who defend Obama. “The most faith they have, hubristic though it may turn out to be,” Cooper argues, “is in themselves to be agents of change.”<br />
<br /></section><div class="ad-boxinjector-wrapper" style="background-color: white; clear: both; font-family: 'Lyon Text', Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 30.0001px; text-align: center;">
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<section id="article-section-12" style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Lyon Text', Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 30.0001px; margin: 0px auto; max-width: 630px; padding-right: 330px; width: 630px;">Had Black Lives Matter existed when Bill Clinton was seeking the presidency, he probably would have run against the group. In January 1992, less than three weeks before the Iowa caucuses, Clinton flew back to Arkansas to oversee the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, an African American man so mentally deficient at the time of his execution that he didn’t even realize the people he had shot were dead. Then, in June 1992, in the aftermath of the Los Angeles riots, Clinton plucked a rapper named Sister Souljah out of relative obscurity and publicly lambasted her for reportedly saying, in response to a question about African American rioters who attacked whites, “If black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?” Eager to emphasize his centrist credentials, Clinton found African American militancy an invaluable foil.<br />
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Today, by contrast, the Democratic Establishment has responded to Black Lives Matter much as it responded to Occupy: with applause. In July, at the Netroots Nation conference in Phoenix, Black Lives Matter activists repeatedly interrupted and heckled Sanders and his fellow candidate Martin O’Malley. At one point, an activist came onto the stage and declared that the event was occurring on “indigenous land” whose border “was drawn by white-supremacist manifest destiny.” For roughly 15 minutes, O’Malley stood in silence as the activists onstage gave speeches.<br />
<br /></section><div class="ad-boxinjector-wrapper" style="background-color: white; clear: both; font-family: 'Lyon Text', Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 30.0001px; text-align: center;">
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<section id="article-section-13" style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Lyon Text', Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 30.0001px; margin: 0px auto; max-width: 630px; padding-right: 330px; width: 630px;">Afterward, liberal pundits mostly criticized O’Malley and Sanders for not expressing more sympathy for the people who had disrupted their events. “Both candidates fumbled,” argued <i>The Nation</i>. “Frankly,” MoveOn announced, “all Democratic presidential candidates need to do better.”<br />
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The candidates themselves agreed. Later that day, O’Malley publicly apologized for having said that “all lives matter,” which activists said minimized the singularity of state violence against African Americans. He soon unveiled an ambitious plan to reduce police brutality and incarceration rates, as well as a constitutional amendment protecting the right to vote. Sanders apologized too. He hired an African American press secretary sympathetic to Black Lives Matter, added a “racial justice” section to his Web site, joined members of the Congressional Black Caucus in introducing legislation to ban private prisons, and began publicly citing the names of African Americans killed by police. Hillary Clinton, having already vowed to “end the era of mass incarceration” that her husband and other Democrats helped launch in the 1990s, has now met with Black Lives Matter activists twice. Bill Clinton has said he regrets his own role in expanding the incarceration state. And the Democratic National Committee passed a resolution supporting Black Lives Matter—which the movement itself quickly disavowed.<br />
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<span class="smallcaps" style="font-variant: small-caps;">During presidential primaries, </span>candidates often pander to their party’s base. So what’s most remarkable isn’t Hillary Clinton’s move to the left, or the Democratic Party’s. It’s the American public’s willingness to go along.</div>
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</section><div class="ad-boxinjector-wrapper" style="background-color: white; clear: both; font-family: 'Lyon Text', Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 30.0001px; text-align: center;">
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<section id="article-section-14" style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Lyon Text', Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 30.0001px; margin: 0px auto; max-width: 630px; padding-right: 330px; width: 630px;">Take Black Lives Matter. In the 1960s, African American riots and the Black Power movement sparked a furious white backlash. In April 1965, note Thomas and Mary Edsall in their book <i>Chain Reaction</i>, 28 percent of nonsouthern whites thought President Lyndon B. Johnson was pushing civil rights “too fast.” By September 1966, after riots in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Cleveland, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s turn from racial integration toward Black Power, that figure had reached 52 percent.<br />
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This time, however, the opposite is happening. In July 2014, the Pew Research Center reported that 46 percent of Americans agreed with the statement “Our country needs to continue making changes to give blacks equal rights with whites.” By July 2015, after the riots in Ferguson and Baltimore and the rise of Black Lives Matter, that figure had risen to 59 percent. From the summer of 2013 to the summer of 2015, according to Gallup, the percentage of Americans who declared themselves “satisfied with the way blacks are treated in U.S. society” dropped from 62 percent to 49 percent. In 2015, public confidence in the police hit a 22-year low.<br />
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Much of this shift is being driven by a changing mood among whites. Between January and April alone, according to a YouGov poll, the percentage of whites who called deaths like those of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray “isolated incident[s]” dropped 20 points. There’s even been movement within the GOP. From 2014 to 2015, the percentage of Republicans saying America needs to make changes to give blacks an equal chance rose 15 points—more than the percentage increase among Democrats or Independents.<br />
<br /></section><div class="ad-boxinjector-wrapper" style="background-color: white; clear: both; font-family: 'Lyon Text', Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 30.0001px; text-align: center;">
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<section id="article-section-15" style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Lyon Text', Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 30.0001px; margin: 0px auto; max-width: 630px; padding-right: 330px; width: 630px;">That’s not to say Ferguson, Baltimore, and Black Lives Matter have sparked no backlash at all. Donald Trump has called “the way they [Black Lives Matter] are being catered to by the Democrats” a “disgrace.” Ted Cruz has accused the movement of inciting the murder of police, a theme also promoted on Fox News.<br />
<br /></section><figure class="full-width" style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Lyon Text', Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 30.0001px; margin: 0px auto 0px calc(50% - 480px); max-width: 960px; padding: 10px 0px; position: relative; width: 960px;"><picture style="display: block; height: 0px; overflow: hidden; padding-bottom: 549px; position: relative; width: 960px;"><img alt="" class=" lazyloaded" data-src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2015/12/WEL_Beinart_BLM/fc496a36f.jpg" height="366" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2015/12/WEL_Beinart_BLM/fc496a36f.jpg" style="border: 0px; height: 549px; left: 0px; max-width: 100%; opacity: 1; position: absolute; top: 0px; transition: opacity 300ms; vertical-align: middle; width: 960px;" width="640" /></picture><figcaption class="caption" style="font-family: 'Proxima Nova', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 0.77778rem; line-height: 1.28571; padding-top: 8px;">Bernie Sanders stands aside as his microphone is hijacked by Black Lives Matter activists at an August rally in Seattle. (Associated Press)</figcaption></figure><section id="article-section-16" style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Lyon Text', Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 30.0001px; margin: 0px auto; max-width: 630px; padding-right: 330px; width: 630px;">Still, even as some Republican politicians attack Black Lives Matter, others are working with Democrats to promote an agenda of police and prison reform. Last year, then–Speaker of the House John Boehner declared, “We’ve got a lot of people in prison that frankly, in my view, really don’t need to be there.” In October, a group of conservative Republican senators—Chuck Grassley, John Cornyn, Mike Lee, and Lindsey Graham—joined Democrats in introducing legislation to reduce mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug crimes, roll back harsh “three strikes and you’re out” sentencing laws, end solitary confinement for juveniles, and allow teenagers to have their criminal records expunged.<br />
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Even among the Republicans running for president, the policy agenda is moving away from the punitive approach both parties once embraced. Mike Huckabee, Rand Paul, Chris Christie, John Kasich, and Ted Cruz have all condemned the excessive imprisonment of nonviolent drug offenders.<br />
<br /></section><div class="ad-boxinjector-wrapper" style="background-color: white; clear: both; font-family: 'Lyon Text', Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 30.0001px; text-align: center;">
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<section id="article-section-17" style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Lyon Text', Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 30.0001px; margin: 0px auto; max-width: 630px; padding-right: 330px; width: 630px;">Most interesting—because he is the Republican candidate with the keenest sense of how to appeal to the general electorate—has been the approach of Senator Marco Rubio. In August, a Fox News anchor asked him about Black Lives Matter. Instead of condemning the movement, Rubio told the story of an African American friend of his whom police had stopped eight or nine times over the previous 18 months even though he had never broken the law. “This is a problem our nation has to confront,” Rubio declared. Then he talked about young African Americans who get arrested for nonviolent offenses and pushed into plea deals by overworked public defenders. The government, he said, must “look for ways to divert people” from going to jail “so that you don’t get people stigmatized early in life.”<br />
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Conservative Republicans didn’t talk this way in the ’90s. They didn’t talk this way even in the early Obama years. The fact that Rubio does so now is more evidence that today, unlike in the mid-’60s, the debate about race and justice isn’t moving to the right. It’s moving further left.<br />
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<span class="smallcaps" style="font-variant: small-caps;">What’s different this </span><span class="smallcaps" style="font-variant: small-caps;">time?</span> One difference is that in the 1960s and ’70s, crime exploded, fueling a politics of fear and vengeance. Over the past two decades, by contrast, crime has plummeted. And despite some hyperbolic headlines, there’s no clear evidence that it’s rising significantly again. As <i>The Washington Post</i>’s Max Ehrenfreund noted in September after reviewing the data so far for 2015, “While the number of homicides has increased in many big cities, the increases are moderate, not more than they were a few years ago. Meanwhile, crime has declined in other cities. Overall, most cities are still far safer than they were two decades ago.”</div>
<aside class="pullquote instapaper_ignore" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-top-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); border-top-style: solid; border-top-width: 10px; font-family: 'Lyon Display', Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 2rem; font-weight: bold; line-height: 1.05556; margin: 40px 0px; padding: 25px 0px 20px;">On issue after issue, it is the young who are most pleased with the liberal policy shifts of the Obama era, and most eager for more.</aside>And it’s not just crime where the Democratic Party’s move leftward is being met with acceptance rather than rejection. Take LGBT rights: A decade ago, it was considered suicidal for a Democratic politician to openly support gay marriage. Now that debate is largely over, and liberals are pushing for antidiscrimination laws that cover transgender people, a group many Americans weren’t even aware of until Caitlyn Jenner made headlines. At first glance, this might seem like too much change, too fast. Marriage equality, after all, gives gays and lesbians access to a fundamentally conservative institution. The transgender-rights movement poses a far more radical question: Should people get to define their own gender, irrespective of biology?<br />
<br /></section><div class="ad-boxinjector-wrapper" style="background-color: white; clear: both; font-family: 'Lyon Text', Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 30.0001px; text-align: center;">
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<section id="article-section-18" style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Lyon Text', Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 30.0001px; margin: 0px auto; max-width: 630px; padding-right: 330px; width: 630px;">Yet the nation’s answer, by large margins, seems to be yes. When the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law examined polls, it found that between two-thirds and three-quarters of Americans now support barring discrimination against transgender people. It also found a dramatic rise in recent years in the percentage of Americans who consider anti-transgender discrimination a “major problem.” According to Andrew Flores, who conducted the study, a person’s attitude toward gays and lesbians largely predicts their attitude toward transgender people. Most Americans, in other words, having decided that discriminating against lesbians and gay men was wrong, have simply extended that view to transgender people via what Flores describes as a “mechanism of attitude generalization.”<br />
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That is why, in the 2016 presidential race, Republicans have shown little interest in opposing transgender rights. In July, the Pentagon announced that transgender people will be able to serve openly in the military. One Republican presidential candidate, Mike Huckabee, denounced the move. Another, Jeb Bush, appeared to support it. The remaining contenders largely avoided the issue.</section><figure class="full-width" style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Lyon Text', Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 30.0001px; margin: 0px auto 0px calc(50% - 480px); max-width: 960px; padding: 10px 0px; position: relative; width: 960px;"><picture style="display: block; height: 0px; overflow: hidden; padding-bottom: 672px; position: relative; width: 960px;"><img alt="" class=" lazyloaded" data-src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2015/12/WEL_Beinart_Clinton/ea1af71d3.jpg" height="448" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2015/12/WEL_Beinart_Clinton/ea1af71d3.jpg" style="border: 0px; height: 672px; left: 0px; max-width: 100%; opacity: 1; position: absolute; top: 0px; transition: opacity 300ms; vertical-align: middle; width: 960px;" width="640" /></picture><figcaption class="caption" style="font-family: 'Proxima Nova', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 0.77778rem; line-height: 1.28571; padding-top: 8px;">The surging Millennial vote is one reason why, if Hillary Clinton wins the presidency, she will most likely govern to the left of Barack Obama on domestic policy. (Associated Press)</figcaption></figure><section id="article-section-19" style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Lyon Text', Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 30.0001px; margin: 0px auto; max-width: 630px; padding-right: 330px; width: 630px;">There has been little public backlash on economics, either. President Obama has intervened more extensively in the economy than any other president in close to half a century. In his first year, he pushed through the largest economic stimulus in American history—larger in inflation-adjusted terms than Franklin Roosevelt’s famed Works Progress Administration. In his second year, he muscled universal health care through Congress, something progressives had been dreaming about since Theodore Roosevelt ran as a Bull Moose. That same year, he signed a law re-regulating Wall Street. He’s also spent roughly $20 billion bailing out the auto industry, increased fuel-efficiency standards for cars and trucks, toughened emissions standards for coal-fired power plants, authorized the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate the production of carbon dioxide, expanded the Food and Drug Administration’s ability to regulate the sale of tobacco products, doubled the amount of fruits and vegetables required in school lunches, designated 2 million acres as wilderness, and protected more than 1,000 miles of rivers.<br />
<br /></section><div class="ad-boxinjector-wrapper" style="background-color: white; clear: both; font-family: 'Lyon Text', Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 30.0001px; text-align: center;">
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<section id="article-section-20" style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Lyon Text', Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 30.0001px; margin: 0px auto; max-width: 630px; padding-right: 330px; width: 630px;">This intervention has sparked an angry response on the Republican right, but not among Americans as a whole. In polling, Americans typically say they favor smaller government in general while supporting many specific government programs. When Bill Clinton took office in 1993, Americans said they favored “a smaller government providing fewer services” over “a bigger government providing more services” by 37 percentage points. When Obama took power in 2009, the margin was a mere eight points. And despite the president’s many economic interventions, the most recent time Pew asked that question, in September 2014, the margin was exactly the same.<br />
On health care, the story is similar: no public backlash. When Obama signed the Affordable Care Act in March 2010, most polls showed Americans opposing it by about eight to 10 points. Today, the margin is almost identical. Little has changed on taxes, either, even though Obama allowed some of the tax cuts passed under George W. Bush to expire. The percentage of Americans who say they pay more than their fair share in taxes is about the same as it was in the spring of 2010 (Pew does not have data for 2009), and lower than it was during the Clinton years.<br />
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It’s true that Americans have grown more conservative on some issues over the past few years. Support for gun control has dropped in the Obama era, even as the president and other Democrats have pursued it more aggressively. Republicans also enjoy a renewed advantage on combatting international terrorism, an issue whose salience has grown with the rise of the Islamic State. Still, in an era when government has grown more intrusive, African American activists have grown more confrontational, and long-standing assumptions about sexual orientation and gender identity have been toppled, most Americans are not yelling “stop,” as they began doing in the mid-1960s. The biggest reason: We’re not dealing with the same group of Americans.<br />
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<section id="article-section-21" style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Lyon Text', Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 30.0001px; margin: 0px auto; max-width: 630px; padding-right: 330px; width: 630px;"><div class="dropcap">
<span class="smallcaps" style="font-variant: small-caps;">On issue after issue,</span> it is the young who are most pleased with the liberal policy shifts of the Obama era, and most eager for more. In 2014, Pew found that Americans under 30 were twice as likely as Americans 65 and older to say the police do a “poor” job of “treating racial, ethnic groups equally” and more than twice as likely to say the grand jury in Ferguson was wrong not to charge Darren Wilson in Michael Brown’s death. According to YouGov, more than one in three Americans 65 and older think being transgender is morally wrong. Among Americans under 30, the ratio is less than one in five. Millennials—Americans roughly 18 to 34 years old—are 21 percentage points less likely than those 65 and older to say that immigrants “burden” the United States and 25 points more likely to say they “strengthen” the country. Millennials are also 17 points more likely to have a favorable view of Muslims. It is largely because of them that the percentage of Americans who want government to “promote traditional values” is now lower than at any other time since Gallup began asking the question in 1993, and that the percentage calling themselves “socially liberal” now equals the percentage calling themselves “socially conservative” for the first time since Gallup began asking that question in 1999.</div>
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Millennials are also sustaining support for bigger government. The young may not have a high opinion of the institutions that represent them, but they nonetheless want those institutions to do more. According to a July <i>Wall Street Journal</i>/ABC poll, Americans over 35 were four points more likely to say the government is doing too much than to say it is doing too little. Millennials, meanwhile, by a margin of 23 points, think it’s doing too little. In 2011, Pew found that while the oldest Americans supported repealing health-care reform by 29 percentage points, Millennials favored expanding it by 17 points. They were also 25 points more likely than those 65 and older to approve of Occupy Wall Street and 36 points more favorable toward socialism, which they actually<i>preferred</i> to capitalism, 49 percent to 46 percent. As the Pew report put it, “Millennials, at least so far, hold ‘baked in’ support for a more activist government.”<br />
<br /></section><div class="ad-boxinjector-wrapper" style="background-color: white; clear: both; font-family: 'Lyon Text', Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 30.0001px; text-align: center;">
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<section id="article-section-22" style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Lyon Text', Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 30.0001px; margin: 0px auto; max-width: 630px; padding-right: 330px; width: 630px;">This is even true among Republican Millennials. The press often depicts American politics as a battle pitting ever more liberal Democrats against ever more conservative Republicans. Among the young, however, that’s inaccurate. Young Democrats may be more liberal than their elders, but so are young Republicans. According to Pew, a clear majority of young Republicans say immigrants strengthen America, half say corporate profits are too high, and almost half say stricter environmental laws are worth the cost—answers that sharply distinguish them from older members of the GOP. Young Republicans are more likely to favor legalizing marijuana than the oldest Democrats, and almost as likely to support gay marriage. Asked how they categorize themselves ideologically, more than two-thirds of Republican Millennials call themselves either “liberal” or “mixed,” while fewer than one-third call themselves “conservative.” Among the oldest Republicans, that breakdown is almost exactly reversed.<br />
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In the face of such data, conservatives may wish to reassure themselves that Millennials will move right as they age. But a 2007 study in the <i>American Sociological Review</i> notes that the data “contradict commonly held assumptions that aging leads to conservatism.” The older Americans who are today more conservative than Millennials were more conservative in their youth, too. In 1984 and 1988, young voters backed Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush by large margins. Millennials are not liberal primarily because they are young. They are liberal because their formative political experiences were the Iraq War and the Great Recession, and because they make up the most secular, most racially diverse, least nationalistic generation in American history. And none of that is likely to change.<br />
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<span class="smallcaps" style="font-variant: small-caps;">One can question </span>how much this matters. America is not governed by public-opinion polls, after all. Congressional redistricting, felon disenfranchisement, and the obliteration of campaign-finance laws all help insulate politicians from the views of ordinary people, and generally empower the right. But despite these structural disadvantages, Obama has enacted a more consequential progressive agenda than either of his two Democratic predecessors did. And there is reason to believe that regardless of who wins the presidency in 2016, she or he will be more progressive than the previous president of her or his own party.</div>
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According to Microsoft’s betting market, Predictwise, Democrats have close to a 60 percent chance of holding the White House in 2016. That’s not because Hillary Clinton, whom the Democrats will likely nominate, is an exceptionally strong candidate. It’s because the Republicans may nominate an exceptionally weak one. According to Predictwise, in early November Marco Rubio—widely considered the GOP’s strongest general-election candidate—had a 45 percent chance of winning his party’s nomination. But according to Predictwise, there was also a 37 percent chance that Donald Trump, Ben Carson, or Ted Cruz would win the nomination. And if any of them did, Clinton’s election would be all but assured.<br />
<aside class="pullquote instapaper_ignore" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-top-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); border-top-style: solid; border-top-width: 10px; font-family: 'Lyon Display', Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 2rem; font-weight: bold; line-height: 1.05556; margin: 40px 0px; padding: 25px 0px 20px;">Barack Obama sought the presidency hoping to be the Democrats’ Reagan: a president who changed America’s ideological trajectory. And he has changed it.</aside>If Clinton does win, it’s likely that on domestic policy, she will govern to Obama’s left. (On foreign policy, where there is no powerful left-wing activist movement like Occupy or Black Lives Matter, the political dynamics are very different.) Clinton’s campaign proposals already signal a leftward shift. And people close to her campaign suggest that among her top agenda items would be paid family leave, debt-free college tuition, and universal preschool.<br />
<br /></section><div class="ad-boxinjector-wrapper" style="background-color: white; clear: both; font-family: 'Lyon Text', Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 30.0001px; text-align: center;">
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<section id="article-section-24" style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Lyon Text', Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 30.0001px; margin: 0px auto; max-width: 630px; padding-right: 330px; width: 630px;">This agenda flows naturally from Clinton’s long interest in the welfare of children and families. But it’s also the product of a Democratic Party that leans further left than it did in 1993 or 2009. If elected, Clinton will have to work with a Senate that contains two nationally prominent Democrats, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, both of whom are extremely popular with liberal activists.<br />
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Already, Obama has felt liberals’ wrath. In 2013, Lawrence Summers withdrew his name from consideration to be the chairman of the Federal Reserve after Senate liberals protested his nomination. In 2015, Obama’s pick for Treasury’s undersecretary for domestic finance, Antonio Weiss, withdrew his own nomination after Warren attacked his Wall Street ties.<a data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'0',r'419112'" href="http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/01/why-america-is-moving-left/419112/#Antonio%20Weiss" style="color: #458cd5; text-decoration: none;">*</a> Clinton will face this reality from her first day in office. And she will face it knowing that because she cannot inspire liberals rhetorically as Obama can, they will be less likely to forgive her heresies on policy. Like Lyndon B. Johnson after John F. Kennedy, she will have to deliver in substance what she cannot deliver in style.<br />
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Just as Clinton would govern to Obama’s left, it’s likely that any Republican capable of winning the presidency in 2016 would govern to the left of George W. Bush. In the first place, winning at all would require a different coalition. When Bush won the presidency in 2000, very few Millennials could vote. In 2016, by contrast, they will constitute roughly one-third of those who turn out. In 2000, African Americans, Hispanics, and Asians constituted 20 percent of voters. In 2016, they will constitute more than 30 percent. Whit Ayres, a political consultant for the Rubio campaign, calculates that even if the 2016 Republican nominee wins 60 percent of the white vote (more than any GOP nominee in the past four decades except Reagan, in 1984, has won), he or she will still need almost 30 percent of the minority vote. Mitt Romney got 17 percent.<br />
<br /></section><div class="ad-boxinjector-wrapper" style="background-color: white; clear: both; font-family: 'Lyon Text', Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 30.0001px; text-align: center;">
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<section id="article-section-25" style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Lyon Text', Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 30.0001px; margin: 0px auto; max-width: 630px; padding-right: 330px; width: 630px;">This need to win the votes of Millennials and minorities, who lean left not just on cultural issues but on economic ones, will shape how any conceivable Republican president campaigns in the general election, and governs once in office. It could tempt a President Rubio to push for immigration reform that, while beginning with toughened enforcement, lays out a path to legalization, and eventually citizenship—something he still supports, despite the fury of his party’s base. (So does Speaker of the House Paul Ryan.)<br />
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If America’s demographics have changed since the Bush presidency, so has the climate among conservative intellectuals. There is now an influential community of “reformocons”—in some ways comparable to the New Democratic thinkers of the 1980s—who believe Republicans have focused too much on cutting taxes for the wealthy and not enough on addressing the economic anxieties of the middle and working classes.<br />
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The candidate closest to the reformocons is Rubio, who cites several of them by name in his recent book. He says that partially privatizing Social Security, which Bush ran on in 2000 and 2004, is an idea whose “time has passed.” And unlike Bush, and both subsequent Republican presidential nominees, Rubio is not proposing a major cut in the top income-tax rate. Instead, the centerpiece of his economic plan is an expanded child tax credit, which would be available even to Americans who are so poor that they don’t pay income taxes.<br />
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Although liberals praised his plan for “upend[ing] the last half century of conservative thinking on taxes,” as <i>The New Republic </i>put it, Rubio included new cuts on taxes of capital gains, dividends, interest, and inherited estates, which overwhelmingly benefit the rich. But despite this, it’s likely that were he elected, Rubio wouldn’t push through as large, or as regressive, a tax cut as Bush did in 2001 and 2003. Partly, that’s because a younger and more ethnically diverse electorate is less tolerant of such policies. Partly, it’s because Rubio’s administration would likely contain a reformocon faction more interested in cutting taxes for the middle class than for the rich. And partly, it’s because the legacy of the Bush tax cuts themselves would make them harder to replicate.<br />
<br />
A key figure in passing the Bush tax cuts was Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, who in 2001 warned that unless Washington lowered tax rates, surpluses might grow too large, thus producing a dangerous “accumulation of private assets by the federal government.” Greenspan’s argument gave the Bush administration crucial intellectual cover. But the idea now looks laughable. And it’s hard to imagine the current Federal Reserve chair, Janet Yellen, endorsing large upper-income tax cuts in 2017.<br />
<br />
The Bush tax cuts also passed because a powerful minority of Democrats supported them. But the kind of centrist, Chamber of Commerce–friendly Democrats who helped Bush pass his tax plan in 2001—including Max Baucus, John Breaux, Mary Landrieu, Zell Miller, Max Cleland, Tim Johnson, Blanche Lambert Lincoln—barely exist anymore. The Democrats’ shift left over the past decade and a half means that a President Rubio would encounter more militant opposition than Bush did in 2001. That militant opposition, along with a changed electorate and the reformocon faction, doesn’t mean Rubio wouldn’t cut taxes. He likely would. But he would face greater pressure than Bush did to keep the cuts from too blatantly benefiting the rich.<br />
As president, Rubio could gut the regulations imposed by Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency. His big donors would certainly push him to, even though doing so would hurt him among younger voters. But he’d be unlikely to repeal health-care reform. The plan Rubio has proposed would strip millions of Americans of their insurance. In other words, it would commit the same sins that Rubio and other Republicans attribute to the Affordable Care Act. Republicans, notes <i>Vox</i>’s editor in chief, Ezra Klein, “have spent the past four years attacking Obamacare for its tough trade-offs and unpopular decisions, but the moment they begin pushing a serious alternative, they’ll suddenly have to deal with Democrats doing the same to them.” Which makes it unlikely Rubio would pick that fight early in his first term.<br />
Would Rubio be a more conservative president than Obama? Of course. An era of liberal dominance doesn’t mean that the ideological differences between Democrats and Republicans disappear. It means that on the ideological playing field, the 50-yard line shifts further left. It means the next Republican president won’t be able to return the nation to the pre-Obama era.<br />
<br />
That’s what happened when Dwight Eisenhower followed Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman. Ike moderated the growth in government expansion that had begun in the 1930s, but he didn’t return American politics to the 1920s, when the GOP opposed any federal welfare state at all. He in essence ratified the New Deal. It’s also what happened when Bill Clinton followed Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. By passing punitive anticrime laws, repealing restrictions on banks, signing <span class="smallcaps" style="font-variant: small-caps;">NAFTA</span>, cutting government spending to balance the budget, reforming welfare, and declaring that the “era of big government is over,” Clinton acknowledged that even a Democratic president could not revive the full-throated liberalism of the 1960s and ’70s. He ratified Reaganism.<br />
<br />
Barack Obama sought the presidency hoping to be the Democrats’ Reagan: a president who changed America’s ideological trajectory. And he has changed it. He has pushed the political agenda as dramatically to the left as Reagan pushed it to the right, and, as under Reagan, the public has acquiesced more than it has rebelled. Reagan’s final victory came when Democrats adapted to the new political world he had made, and there is reason to believe that the next Republican president will find it necessary to make similar concessions to political reality.<br />
<br />
This political cycle, too, will ultimately run its course. A sustained rise in crime could breed fissures between African American activists and young whites or even Latinos. Slower economic growth and a rising budget deficit could turn the public against government in a way that Obama’s policies have not—and force Democrats to again emphasize the creation of wealth more than its distribution. How this era of liberal dominance will end is anyone’s guess. But it will likely endure for some time to come.</section>NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03499454400310101800noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4272948272257156976.post-47061072435640038072014-03-19T15:37:00.000-07:002014-03-19T15:37:07.083-07:00Finding Populism Today<div id="page-logo">
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Published on Wednesday, March 19, 2014 by <a href="http://www.creators.com/liberal/jim-hightower.html">Creators.com</a>
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<a href="http://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/03/19-1" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: x-large;">Finding Populism Today</span></a></h2>
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by <a href="http://www.commondreams.org/jim-hightower">Jim Hightower</a></div>
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<span class="image-full" style="width: 540px;"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://www.commondreams.org/sites/commondreams.org/files/imce-images/12678075.jpg" style="height: 304px; width: 540px;" title="To find populism flowering today, take a road trip across any stretch of America, or take a gander around your community. (File)" /><span class="caption"> </span></span><br />
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<i><span class="image-full" style="width: 540px;"><span class="caption">To find populism flowering today, take a road trip across any stretch of America, or take a gander around your community. (File)</span></span></i><br />
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Mass
movements don't just appear out of the fog, fully grown, structured and
mobilized. They emerge in fits and starts over many years, just as the
American Revolution did, and as did the Populists' original idea of a
"cooperative commonwealth." A successful people's movement has to take
the long view, to learn about itself as it builds, nurture the culture
of its people, take chances, create fun for all involved, adapt to
failures and successes, stay steadfast to its principles, have a stoic
tenacity — and organize, organize, organize. A little serendipity helps,
too, so grab it when you can.<br />
<br />
In 2011 a serendipitous moment for the populist cause rumbled across
our land, though later it was widely (and wrongly) dismissed as a
failure. That September, hundreds of young people, loosely aligned with
an upstart group called Occupy Wall Street, took over Zuccotti Park in
New York City and audaciously camped out on the front stoop of the elite
banksters who'd crashed our economy. Occupy's depiction of the
1-percent vs. the 99-percent struck a chord with the unemployed,
underemployed, and the knocked-down middle class. Occupy encampments
quickly sprang up in some 200 cities and towns from coast to coast.<br />
<br />
The uprising was ridiculed (even by many progressive groups) as
naive, undisciplined and "not serious." Who's in charge? Where's their
strategic plan? Why don't they have position papers? All this carping
about Occupy failing to produce the usual trappings of a
Washington-focused interest group missed two essential points the young
people were making: (1) such trappings are not producing any change, and
(2) we're not an interest group, we're a rebellion.<br />
Rebellion has to come first. As it builds, structure and process will
follow in due time. The great strength of Occupy is that it was a
genuine, non-institutional, social, non-wonkish, morally compelling, and
spontaneous stand against the culture of inequality that the moneyed
powers are imposing. It touched people in deeper ways than issue
politics will ever do. And the great achievement of Occupy is that it
prompted a cultural shift that turned Wall Street's barons into social
pariahs and put the issue of inequality directly at the center of our
nation's political debate.<br />
<br />
To find populism flowering today, take a road trip across any stretch
of America, or take a gander around your community. You will find a
splendid array of ordinary folks rebelling against the bosses, bankers,
big shots and bastards who dare subjugate us to their greed, including:<br />
<br />
— Mad-as-hellers in dozens of states, often in isolated rural areas,
now form an increasingly effective guerrilla network to combat the
massive invasion by global oil and gas giants to frack our land. Last
November, three Colorado cities beat back Big Oil's money and the lies
of some of their own political officials in a vote to ban fracking in
their areas. New York State and more than 100 other cities have imposed
moratoria or bans on this corporate plundering.<br />
<br />
— Putting a specific face on Occupy's theme of gross economic
inequality, a nationwide revolt of exploited fast-food workers erupted
last summer, gaining the high ground against McDonald's and other
poverty-wage profiteers. While Washington sticks to the miserly federal
minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, grassroots campaigns are elevating state
and local minimums to $10 an hour and above. Last month, with much
pressure from the outside agitators, President Obama signed an executive
order, which says the minimum wage for federal contract workers is
$10.10 an hour.<br />
<br />
— Two huge corporate/government cabals — the sovereignty-sucking
Trans-Pacific Partnership and the NSA's secret, Orwellian program of
spying on every American - are coming unraveled, thanks to public
outrage that has united a left-right coalition in Congress. Meanwhile,
the crucial populist struggle to salvage our democracy from the Supreme
Court's scurrilous Citizens United edict, quietly continues to gain
ground with 16 states and over 200 local jurisdictions passing proposals
in support of a constitutional repeal of the Court's ruling.<br />
<br />
There's so much more underway, such as placing a Robin Hood tax on
Wall Street speculators; a surge in co-ops as a democratic alternative
to corporate control; getting Monsanto's genetically altered organisms
out of our food supply; a vibrant and positive campaign by immigrants
themselves for immigrant rights; battling giants such as Disney World
and Walmart to win paid sick leave days for low-wage workers; freeing
college students from Wall Street's loan sharks. All of these and so
many more are the sprouting seeds of a widespread, flourishing Populist
movement. The moment is ripe to bond them into something larger.<br />
<br />
<br />
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© 2014 Creators</div>
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<a href="http://www.commondreams.org/jim-hightower"><img alt="Jim Hightower" class="imagecache imagecache-author_photo" height="60" src="https://www.commondreams.org/sites/commondreams.org/files/imagecache/author_photo/jim-hightower.jpg" title="Jim Hightower" width="90" /></a> </div>
<div class="author-brief-article">
National radio commentator, writer, public speaker, and author of the book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/0470422831?tag=commondreams-20/ref=nosim" target="_blank">Swim Against The Current: Even A Dead Fish Can Go With The Flow</a>,
Jim Hightower has spent three decades battling the Powers That Be on
behalf of the Powers That Ought To Be - consumers, working families,
environmentalists, small businesses, and just-plain-folks.<br />
</div>
NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03499454400310101800noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4272948272257156976.post-58628260982736380292014-01-15T17:55:00.000-08:002014-01-15T17:55:15.690-08:00Fifteen Millennial Movements to Watch This Spring<a href="http://www.thenation.com/"><img id="logo-main" src="http://www.thenation.com/sites/thenation.com/themes/thenation/images/logo-main.gif?v=3" /></a><br />
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<img alt="StudentNation" class="author-image" src="http://www.thenation.com/sites/default/files/Student_Nation_Logo_0.jpg" title="StudentNation" />
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<a href="http://www.thenation.com/blogs/studentnation">StudentNation</a></h2>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Campus-oriented news, first-person reports from student activists and journalists about their campus.</span></h3>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><a href="http://www.thenation.com/blog/177872/fifteen-millennial-movements-watch-spring" title="Fifteen Millennial Movements to Watch This Spring">Fifteen Millennial Movements to Watch This Spring</a></span></h2>
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<a href="http://www.thenation.com/authors/studentnation">StudentNation</a> <span class="timestamp"><abbr class="published" title="2014-01-13T10:38:42-18000">on January 13, 2014 - 10:38 AM ET</abbr></span><div class="field field-type-filefield field-field-image">
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<a class="thickbox initThickbox-processed" href="http://www.thenation.com/sites/default/files/ccsf_protest_sanfrancisco_cc_img_0.jpg" rel="gallery-177872" title="Save CCSF Rally "><img alt="Save CCSF Rally" class="imagecache imagecache-main_node_view_image" height="400" src="http://www.thenation.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/main_node_view_image/ccsf_protest_sanfrancisco_cc_img_0.jpg" title="Save CCSF Rally " width="615" /></a> </div>
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<em>Protesters attend a Save CCSF rally in San
Francisco to prevent the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior
Colleges from revoking the City College of San Francisco’s
accreditation. (<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/forabitmorecontext/8598599701/in/photolist-e6Q57Z-f8Hc8U-f8HacA-f8H9HJ-f8sUgt-f8sWeZ-f8sUH2-f8sVHV-f6FCif-f6rk2X-f6FFWS-f6p332-dkwoi7-f6uZeH-f6vdvg-f6v4Pz-f6KkY9-f6vhzD-f6KtX7-f6v77c-dpRZzc-j9KMPx-j9N9oy-j9Qm1Q-j9NvXM-j9T5Uw-3HupDF-9rRvsb-fJdgEj-fHV4yt-fHVNCM-fJd4Zd-fHUWnt-fHVBxc-fHVh56-fJcFfu-j9Q9D9-j9PdQ6-j9PeTZ-gGkJPV-dq57Cp-8NSNU6/" target="_blank">For A Bit More Context</a>/Flickr)</em><br />
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<em>Last spring, The Nation</em><em> launched its biweekly student
movement dispatch. As part of the StudentNation blog, each dispatch
hosts ten first-person updates on student and youth organizing in the
United States—from established student unions, to emerging national
networks, to ad hoc campaigns that don’t yet have a name. Check out last
year’s posts, in chronological order, here: <a href="http://www.thenation.com/blog/172303/dispatches-us-student-movement" target="_blank">1</a>, <a href="http://www.thenation.com/blog/172599/dispatches-us-student-movement-feb-1" target="_blank">2</a>, <a href="http://www.thenation.com/blog/172930/dispatches-us-student-movement-february-15" target="_blank">3</a>, <a href="http://www.thenation.com/blog/173144/dispatches-us-student-movement-march-1" target="_blank">4</a>, <a href="http://www.thenation.com/blog/173358/dispatches-us-student-movement-march-15" target="_blank">5</a>, <a href="http://www.thenation.com/blog/173576/dispatches-us-student-movement-april-2" target="_blank">6</a>, <a href="http://www.thenation.com/blog/173792/dispatches-us-student-movement-april-15" target="_blank">7</a>, <a href="http://www.thenation.com/blog/174056/ohio-and-macalester-sit-chicago-and-wittenberg-walk-out" target="_blank">8</a>, <a href="http://www.thenation.com/blog/174268/philadelphia-raleigh-students-resist-racism-and-austerity" target="_blank">9</a>, <a href="http://www.thenation.com/blog/174527/chicago-la-students-mass-racial-justice" target="_blank">10</a>, <a href="http://www.thenation.com/blog/174710/nola-new-jersey-students-rise-immigrant-justice" target="_blank">11</a>, <a href="http://www.thenation.com/blog/174923/albuquerque-albany-students-build-regional-networks" target="_blank">12</a>, <a href="http://www.thenation.com/blog/175119/austin-charleston-students-one-supreme-court" target="_blank">13</a>, <a href="http://www.thenation.com/blog/175353/deep-south-midwest-generation-demands-justice" target="_blank">14</a>, <a href="http://www.thenation.com/blog/175576/tallahassee-mexico-city-youth-uprising-continues" target="_blank">15</a>, <a href="http://www.thenation.com/blog/175836/school-year-approaches-students-protest-philadelphia-chicago-and-rhode-island" target="_blank">16</a>, <a href="http://www.thenation.com/blog/176002/sunbelt-capitol-hill-students-mass-racial-justice" target="_blank">17</a>, <a href="http://www.thenation.com/blog/176177/bush-petraeus-and-napolitano-get-tough-student-welcomes" target="_blank">18</a>, <a href="http://www.thenation.com/blog/176380/students-take-teach-america-and-its-political-allies" target="_blank">19</a>, <a href="http://www.thenation.com/blog/176597/across-south-youth-resist-racism-and-homophobia" target="_blank">20</a>, <a href="http://www.thenation.com/blog/176853/new-york-connecticut-and-ohio-students-demand-end-gender-violence" target="_blank">21</a>, <a href="http://www.thenation.com/blog/177068/christie-and-de-blasio-get-voted-students-walk-out" target="_blank">22</a>, <a href="http://www.thenation.com/blog/177324/week-students-shut-down-ice-uc-and-operation-rescue" target="_blank">23</a>, <a href="http://www.thenation.com/blog/177497/youth-resistance-deportations-criminalization-multiplies" target="_blank">24</a>, <a href="http://www.thenation.com/blog/177681/during-finals-students-sat-racism-walked-out-apartheid-and-shut-down-ice" target="_blank">25</a>.</em><br />
<br />
<em>To mark the new year, this week’s theme is emerging organizing. The list is far from exhaustive. </em><br />
<br />
<em>As always, contact <a href="mailto:studentmovement@thenation.com">studentmovement@thenation.com</a> with any questions, tips or proposals. Edited by James Cersonsky (<a href="https://twitter.com/cersonsky">@cersonsky</a>).</em><br />
<h3 style="margin-top: 34px;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><strong>1. In Denver, the Testing Resistance Plans Big</strong></span></h3>
<div style="margin-top: 34px;">
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In 2013, <a href="http://www.students4ourschools.org/media.html" target="_blank">students</a>,
parents and teachers throughout Colorado protested and petitioned to
reverse the tide of education policy. In 2014, we will see new <a href="http://www.cde.state.co.us/assessment/coassess" target="_blank">tests</a> and <a href="http://www.cde.state.co.us/educatoreffectiveness/overviewofsb191" target="_blank">programs</a> that further compromise the value of education. From January 17 to 20, a <a href="http://www.costudentpower.org/#%21cspc/cr45" target="_blank">Colorado Student Power Convergence</a>
will assemble in opposition. We plan to create a campaign to boycott
all standardized testing. Planning will continue at a follow-up
conference in February, the <a href="https://www.facebook.com/StudentPowerContinuum" target="_blank">Student Power Continuum</a>, where we will reach out to parents and students to encourage them to <a href="http://unitedoptout.com/colorado-parent-teacher-offers-advice-insights-on-opting-out-of-tcap/" target="_blank">boycott the TCAP test</a> and organize actions leading to <a href="http://unitedoptout.com/" target="_blank">United Opt Out</a>’s national conference, March 28 to 30, in Denver.<br />
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<div style="margin-top: -8px;">
<em>—Alex Kacsh</em></div>
<h3 style="margin-top: 34px;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><strong>2. In LA, the Undocuqueer Movement Grows</strong></span></h3>
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<br /></div>
Queer and undocumented immigrant youth have been <a href="http://www.dreamactivist.org/queer-undocumented-youth-set-the-record-straight/" target="_blank">at the forefront</a> of the immigrant youth movement. Undocuqueers have developed a critical lens of the mainstream LGBTQ movement by <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/21/julio-salgado-undocuqueer_n_3480327.html" target="_blank">shifting its focus</a> from marriage equality to issues affecting LGBTQ immigrants within education, healthcare and the immigration system. Of the <a href="http://nbclatino.com/2013/10/16/conflicting-views-on-approaching-2-million-deportations/" target="_blank">2 million deportations</a>
carried out under the Obama administration, many are queer, and many
are trans* women placed in detention centers forced to experience <a href="http://www.immigrantjustice.org/stop-abuse-detained-lgbt-immigrants" target="_blank">physical, sexual and psychological abuse</a> by officials and other detainees. In February, expanding on the work of <a href="https://www.facebook.com/QUIPnational" target="_blank">QUIP</a>,
undocuqueer leaders, LGBTQ immigrants, parents and allies in Los
Angeles will launch a national LGBTQ immigrant rights organization.<br />
<br />
<div style="margin-top: -8px;">
<em>—Jorge Gutierrez</em></div>
<h3 style="margin-top: 34px;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><strong>3. As Title IX Sits, the IX Network Spreads</strong></span></h3>
<div style="margin-top: 34px;">
<br /></div>
<a href="https://www.facebook.com/devilsagainstassault" target="_blank">Sun Devils Against Sexual Assault</a>
is a group of current and former Arizona State University students,
staff and faculty committed to ending sexual violence on and off campus.
After losing a major Title IX <a href="http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/otl/news/story?id=3871666" target="_blank">lawsuit</a>
in 2009, ASU made a commitment to protect students from rape culture,
but students’ Title IX rights continue to be violated and the ASU
administration continues to <a href="http://www.statepress.com/2010/07/18/former-student-sues-abor-over-sexual-assault-case/" target="_blank">protect student and faculty predators</a>. In addition to organizing Title IX and Clery Act complaints, SDASA wrote an <a href="http://thefeministwire.com/2013/09/president-crow-take-a-stand-against-rape-culture-at-asu/" target="_blank">open letter to ASU President Michael Crow</a> in September and subsequently <a href="http://sundevilsagainstsexualassault.wordpress.com/2013/12/23/dr-crow-unofficial-interview-about-title-ix-and-rape-culture-at-asu/" target="_blank">confronted him about the issue of rape culture in person</a> last month. President Crow, like his colleague <a href="http://sundevilsagainstsexualassault.wordpress.com/2013/12/31/transcript-asu-hr-kevin-salcido-on-faculty-predators/" target="_blank">Kevin Salcido, Chief of Human Resources</a>,
is more concerned with protecting the University and its reputation
than with protecting students from sexual harassment and assault. SDASA
hopes to add ASU to the <a href="http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/4414800/" target="_blank">growing list of colleges</a> under investigation by the Department of Education for Title IX violations.<br />
<br />
<div style="margin-top: -8px;">
<em>—Jasmine Lester</em></div>
<h3 style="margin-top: 34px;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><strong>4. As NYU Unionizes, Hopkins Fights for Democracy</strong></span></h3>
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Graduate students at Johns Hopkins have organized against <a href="http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/12/11/hopkins-plans-shifts-graduate-school-and-faculty-hiring" target="_blank">a plan that would restructure the university</a>.
Changes include reducing graduate student cohort sizes in social
sciences and humanities, an emphasis on junior faculty and the
centralization of decision-making power with the university
administration. This strategic plan was formulated behind closed doors
with nominal and selective input from faculty and students. More than
270 graduate students have signed a letter calling for a <a href="http://www.jhunewsletter.com/2013/12/05/261-graduate-students-resist-universitys-plan-78677/" target="_blank">one-year moratorium</a>
on the implementation of the plan. Departmental directors of graduate
studies, the academic council and the faculty assembly also called for a
moratorium. Graduate students attempted to confront the dean in person
about the lack of response to the moratorium, but were met by vice deans
and campus security. Like <a href="http://www.salon.com/2013/12/12/tea_party_loses_again_nyu_grad_students_defy_obstruction_in_precedent_setting_98_union_vote/" target="_blank">our peers</a>
facing similar structural reforms at educational institutions across
the country, the graduate students at Johns Hopkins will continue to
fight for democratic inclusion in university governance.<br />
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<div style="margin-top: -8px;">
<em>—Kellan Anfinson, Derek Denman and Chris Forster-Smith</em></div>
<h3 style="margin-top: 34px;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><strong>5. CCSF v. Disaccreditation and Debt</strong></span></h3>
<div style="margin-top: 34px;">
<br /></div>
In October, student organizers at the City College of San Francisco launched the second <a href="https://www.facebook.com/ccsfslap" target="_blank">Student Labor Action Project chapter</a> in California. As part of <a href="http://www.campusequityweek.org/2013/" target="_blank">Campus Equity Week</a>, CCSF SLAP hosted an End the Student Debt Crisis event with a screening of <em><a href="http://vimeo.com/14215806" target="_blank">Default</a></em>
and a panel highlighting the crippling effects of the student loan
industry on students and workers. Attendees were briefed on and asked to
support a CCSF SLAP campaign to <a href="http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/01/03/court-grants-temporary-reprieve-city-college-san-francisco" target="_blank">keep CCSF open and fully accredited</a>.
As one of the largest community colleges in the nation, CCSF is an
affordable pathway to higher education for working-class people.
Nonetheless, this past July, it received notice from the Accrediting
Commission for Junior and Community Colleges that it wanted to close the
institution. A battle has waged on ever since and a judge recently
ruled that a private commission cannot revoke the accreditation of CCSF
until a trial is held to determine if the action is lawful. But the
campaign will continue until CCSF’s future is fully and permanently
secured.<br />
<br />
<div style="margin-top: -8px;">
<em>—Shanell Williams</em></div>
<h3 style="margin-top: 34px;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><strong>6. LAVC v. the Cuts</strong></span></h3>
<div style="margin-top: 34px;">
<br /></div>
After <a href="http://projects.nytimes.com/california-budget" target="_blank">years of statewide cuts</a>, the accumulation of a $5.5 million <a href="http://thevalleystar.com/2013/11/21/budget-deficit-affects-campus/" target="_blank">deficit</a> and the possible threat of academic probation, the Los Angeles Valley College administration <a href="https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151679176086503&set=a.10150095263646503.276360.122863761502&type=1&theater" target="_blank">cut $606,470</a>
from the college budget on November 8. These cuts included thirty-one
already-scheduled classes, part-time faculty, student tutoring services
and the <a href="http://thevalleystar.com/2013/11/21/budget-deficit-runs-track-field-out-of-valley/" target="_blank">entire track and field team</a>—forcing
teammates to go all the way to West LA to participate. The most drastic
impact was a district-mandated increase in the average class size to
thirty-eight students this spring and forty in the fall. On November 26,
<a href="https://www.facebook.com/groups/lavcsac/" target="_blank">Students Against Cuts</a>
formed to fight against the cuts. The group’s ten demands include a
reversal of the cuts, a call for transparent budgeting, a decrease in
salary for top administrators, living wages for campus workers, the
reduction of textbook prices and an increase in the number of classes.<br />
<br />
<div style="margin-top: -8px;">
<em>—Albert Sarian and Dominico Vega</em></div>
<h3 style="margin-top: 34px;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><strong>7. Student Unionism in Rhode Island</strong></span></h3>
<div style="margin-top: 34px;">
<br /></div>
This spring, students at Rhode Island College are launching the <a href="http://www.ristudentunion.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">Rhode Island Student Union Project</a>
with the goal of establishing a vehicle to fight for our interests and
build the power of students across the state. This past semester, the
embryonic RISUP tested combative politics by <a href="http://ristudentunion.wordpress.com/2013/11/12/petition-against-arming-campus-police/" target="_blank">resisting the administration’s attempt to arm campus police</a>. Disrupting the “what-if” narrative triggered by a false-alarm shooting at URI last year, our efforts spurred <a href="http://www.theanchoronline.org/letters-to-the-editor/2013/11/04/campus-police/" target="_blank">critical dialogue</a>
across the campus and successfully led administrative officials to hold
off on what we saw was a very negative policy, at least “<a href="http://www.providencejournal.com/breaking-news/content/20131112-r.i.-college-will-not-arm-campus-police.ece" target="_blank">at this point in time</a>.”<br />
<br />
<div style="margin-top: -8px;">
<em>—Servio Gomez</em></div>
<h3 style="margin-top: 34px;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><strong>8. Socialism in Tennessee</strong></span></h3>
<div style="margin-top: 34px;">
<br /></div>
In the fall, the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, witnessed the birth of its first socialist organization, the <a href="https://www.facebook.com/sewaneesocialists" target="_blank">Sewanee Young Democratic Socialists</a>. Since then, along with <a href="https://www.facebook.com/pages/Hispanic-Organization-for-Latino-Awareness-HOLA/191757767564462" target="_blank">HOLA</a>, which promotes Latino/a cultural awareness, we have cosponsored talks by movement photographer <a href="http://vimeo.com/12928220" target="_blank">Pocho-one</a>
and facilitated workshops to help undocumented students navigate the
college application process. We also participated in the inaugural
meeting of the <a href="http://tnstudentunion.org/" target="_blank">Tennessee Student Union Project</a>,
which seeks to give students and campus workers across the state a
voice against the corporate assault on higher education. Although we
press forward in a historically conservative institution and region, we
have found no shortage of allies.<br />
<br />
<div style="margin-top: -8px;">
<em>—Brandon Kemp</em></div>
<h3 style="margin-top: 34px;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><strong>9. A Working Class Union</strong></span></h3>
<div style="margin-top: 34px;">
<br /></div>
The <a href="http://www.wcsu-rso.org/" target="_blank">Working Class Student Union</a> was <a href="https://chronicle.com/article/Working-Class-Students-Band/124448/" target="_blank">founded by students</a>
at the University of Wisconsin–Madison when one student was told that
kids like her could only get more financial aid if she got pregnant. The
group works to bring social class into diversity discussions, connect
working-class and first-generation students with others who share their
background and provide ready access to campus resources. This spring,
WCSU is working to publish a series of narrative videos from students
and staff on campus with working class, <a href="http://www.wiseye.org/Programming/VideoArchive/EventDetail.aspx?evhdid=8258" target="_blank">low-income</a> and <a href="http://www.imfirst.org/landing/" target="_blank">first-generation</a>
backgrounds, providing support and validation of student experiences on
campus. With this project, we hope to reach students grappling with
social class issues as well as develop support services for these
students.<br />
<br />
<div style="margin-top: -8px;">
<em>—Marissa Hatlen</em></div>
<h3 style="margin-top: 34px;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><strong>10. The Wisconsin Idea, Revisited</strong></span></h3>
<div style="margin-top: 34px;">
<br /></div>
Wisconsin is unique in that students have a <a href="http://unitedcouncil.net/get-involved/toolkits-and-manuals/shared-governance-case-law" target="_blank">constitutional right to shared governance</a>
in the University of Wisconsin system. Still, a culture of fear and
apologetic racism infiltrates the work that students across the system
are trying to accomplish. Aiming to change this culture, <a href="http://www.sankofasquad.com/" target="_blank">Sankofa Squad</a>,
the statewide student association for students of color and allies
across the system, is researching systematic bias and how it is harming
students across the system in order to gauge the types of resources and
skills required to offer equity and justice to those impacted
communities.<br />
<br />
<div style="margin-top: -8px;">
<em>—Lamonte Moore</em></div>
<h3 style="margin-top: 34px;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><strong>11. Dignity in School</strong></span></h3>
<br />
This year, the <a href="http://www.mogsanet.dreamhosters.com/" target="_blank">Missouri GSA Network</a>, with the help of the <a href="http://www.dignityinschools.org/" target="_blank">Dignity in Schools Campaign</a>,
started organizing around socioeconomic justice, with a focus on
student “push-out” and the school-to-prison pipeline. Homophobia and
transphobia are among the primary reasons why students are pushed out of
the institutions that were meant for them. In St. Louis, several
schools have implemented<a href="http://www.ksdk.com/story/news/local/2013/11/14/normandy-school-district-secret/3521871/" target="_blank"> violent and secretive practices</a>
that exacerbate youth criminalization. Our socioeconomic committee,
GSAs for Justice, hosted a rally to start off the school year and will
be marching in St. Louis’s annual MLK day parade. At the end of January,
we will further our understanding of the school-to-prison pipeline by
visiting <a href="http://www.youthbreakout.org/" target="_blank">BreakOUT!</a> in New Orleans. On March 5, we will have our annual<a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/155028721373960/" target="_blank"> Queer Youth & Ally Day</a> at the capital, which is completely run by student leaders.<br />
<br />
<div style="margin-top: -8px;">
<em>—Sterling Waldman</em></div>
<h3 style="margin-top: 34px;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><strong>12. Democracy at Work</strong></span></h3>
<div style="margin-top: 34px;">
<br /></div>
The <a href="https://www.facebook.com/SeiuMillennials" target="_blank">SEIU Millennials</a>
chapter in Los Angeles emerged from a conference this fall, with young
worker representation from Oregon to Florida. Our work focuses on two
questions: First, why are we, as a <a href="https://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/15973/are_young_workers_the_future_of_labor/" target="_blank">younger generation</a>
of healthcare workers, choosing the healthcare industry? Second, what
issues are important to us? I got involved because I want a say in what
happens in my union. I cohosted the last conference call of the year for
the program in which we organized our first interlocal video conference
call, scheduled for January 21. Our goals for 2014 include
strengthening political action, supporting <a href="http://forrespect.org/" target="_blank">Walmart workers</a> and winning greater income for <a href="http://www.salon.com/2013/12/26/from_fast_food_strikes_to_wal_mart_2013_and_the_year_in_labor/" target="_blank">fast-food workers</a><br />
<br />
<div style="margin-top: -8px;">
<em>—Manny Hernandez Jr.</em></div>
<div style="color: #bf0e15; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-weight: bold; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<h3 style="margin-top: 34px;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><strong>13. </strong><strong style="line-height: 2.3em;">As New Jersey Signs the DREAM Act, Arkansas Pushes Tuition Equality</strong></span></h3>
<div style="margin-top: 34px;">
<br /></div>
In the fall, <a href="https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Arkansas-Natural-Dreamers/167916613413718" target="_blank">Arkansas Natural Dreamers</a> targeted Congressman Steve Womack and our ICE office in Fayetteville <a href="http://www.freeweekly.com/2013/11/28/its-natural-to-dream/" target="_blank">as part of</a> United We Dream’s <a href="http://unitedwedream.org/press-releases/united-dream-begins-30-day-escalation-demanding-congress-obama-take-action-immigratio/" target="_blank">thirty days of action</a>.
On January 26, AND is organizing an event for Arkansas leaders to
dicuss how to improve the atmosphere in the state for the undocumented
community. Dreamers will talk about the importance of <a href="http://www.ncsl.org/research/education/undocumented-student-tuition-state-action.aspx" target="_blank">in-state tuition</a> and the importance of working with our national network, <a href="https://www.facebook.com/UnitedWeDream" target="_blank">United We Dream</a>. As the movement grows, we will continue working to synchronize our actions nationwide.<br />
<br />
<div style="margin-top: -8px;">
<em>—Irvin Camacho</em></div>
<h3 style="margin-top: 34px;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><strong><strong>14. A</strong>s Congress Sits, Roanoke Pressures Goodlatte</strong></span></h3>
<div style="margin-top: 34px;">
<br /></div>
In 2014, <a href="https://www.facebook.com/roanokeunitedfamilies?fref=ts" target="_blank">Roanoke United Families for Immigration Reform</a> will continue pressuring Representative Bob Goodlatte, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/13/us/politics/immigration-advocates-undeterred-as-house-departs-without-action.html" target="_blank">urging him to move</a>
on immigration reform this year, an issue he claims will be a top
priority this year. Our organization has come a long way since our first
meeting in October 2013. We held <a href="https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.598424830229501.1073741855.578849688853682&type=1" target="_blank">twenty days of sustained action</a>
outside of Goodlatte’s office with more than 100 people showing up
throughout the month and at least thirty participating every night. This
spring, we’ll continue working on reform on a national level, while
also fighting to make Roanoke a sanctuary city, stopping the detention
and deportation of members of our community and fighting for tuition
equality and driver’s licenses for all undocumented Virginians.<br />
<br />
<div style="margin-top: -8px;">
<em>—Paulina Hernandez</em></div>
<h3 style="margin-top: 34px;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><strong>15. How to Document a Generation?</strong></span></h3>
<div style="margin-top: 34px;">
<br /></div>
This spring, two online spaces, <a href="http://undocumenting.com/" target="_blank">Undocumenting.com</a> and <a href="http://youngist.org/" target="_blank">Youngist.org</a>,
are working together to highlight the multidimensional nature of the
millennial identity and to reinforce our ability to tell our own
stories. Our projects have grown out of disillusionment with mainstream
media’s overwhelming focus on the narratives of millennials—as in <em>Girls</em> or <em>Gossip Girl</em>—and seek to challenge the <a href="http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2143001,00.html" target="_blank">outsourcing</a>
of our stories. Our upcoming collaboration explores the dichotomy of
art and journalistic writing created by young people. Future
collaborations between our projects have the potential to carve out
space for undocu-youth, queer kids, women of color and youth of color to
exist beyond that single narrative. In the long term, we envision a
mediascape that is rooted in social justice and leaves no pieces of
ourselves behind.<br />
<br />
<div style="margin-top: -8px;">
<em>—Sonia Guiñansaca and Isabelle Nastasia</em></div>
<div style="margin-top: -8px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-top: -8px;">
Read Next: <a href="http://www.thenation.com/slideshow/157495/slide-show-top-14-student-activism-stories-year" target="_blank"><span style="color: firebrick;">The Top 14 Student Activism Stories of the Year</span></a></div>
<div style="margin-top: -8px;">
<br /></div>
</div>
<div class="related-terms">
Related Topics: <a href="http://www.thenation.com/section/education">Education</a> | <a href="http://www.thenation.com/section/activism">Activism</a> | <a href="http://www.thenation.com/section/politics">Politics</a></div>
NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03499454400310101800noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4272948272257156976.post-70985117934346044112014-01-09T20:37:00.001-08:002014-01-09T20:37:22.594-08:00CHANGING THE WORLD-THE PSYCHOLOGY OF BELIEF<br />
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<a href="http://www.soldiersforpeaceinternational.org/">Soldiers For Peace International</a>
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<span>Our mission is to join individuals and
groups working in different ways to ensure that our children live in a
rational, sustainable world.
When enough people abandon the belief that war is inevitable,it will
become unthinkable.
War is conducted for corporate Empire. Therefore,the first step to
ending war is ending corporate control of the US government.
All social justice efforts lead to the end of war, the ultimate
injustice. Those who work for justice are Soldiers For Peace.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">COPY RIGHTS NOTICE</span></h4>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span><b><span style="color: #000099;"> </span><span style="color: #990000;"> STEAL THIS BLOG!</span></b></span></span></h4>
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<span><b><br />This
is the personal blog of Rick Staggenborg, MD. The opinions expressed
here do not necessarily reflect the official positions of Take Back
America for the People, an educational 501.c3 nonprofit established by
Dr Staggenborg.<br /><br /><span style="color: #000099;">Feel free to
reproduce any blogs by Dr Staggenborg without prior permission, as long
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<span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span>Thursday, January 9, 2014</span></span></span></h2>
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<a href="http://www.soldiersforpeaceinternational.org/2014/01/changing-world-psychology-of-belief.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: x-large;">CHANGING THE WORLD-THE PSYCHOLOGY OF BELIEF</span></a>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixUFGOBJBAXipKEl3BknNjQ5N06jHhRbbPxcvMzS4uN8-48Pf_FX-NWtwRZSB0VuHj7hvNMbRM2WshMPwlR6-YK-t4CdDFW1CzrCV6VVYMvsy9RWIyUdrY-a5HytXlmmwgQKxkmqa_zNE/s1600/Ignoring+cognitive+dissonance+leads+to+schizophrenia+of+collective+consciousness.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="256" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixUFGOBJBAXipKEl3BknNjQ5N06jHhRbbPxcvMzS4uN8-48Pf_FX-NWtwRZSB0VuHj7hvNMbRM2WshMPwlR6-YK-t4CdDFW1CzrCV6VVYMvsy9RWIyUdrY-a5HytXlmmwgQKxkmqa_zNE/s1600/Ignoring+cognitive+dissonance+leads+to+schizophrenia+of+collective+consciousness.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<b><i>It
is impossible to build a movement without having a shared understanding of the
problem we are trying to solve. The
difficulty in doing this is that all of us view the world from different
perspectives, often radically divergent ones. To build a movement of sufficient
influence to change the dangerous trajectory the world is currently on, we need
to be able to get the broadest coalition of individuals of differing
philosophies possible. <br />
<br />
We are up against a powerful coalition of wealthy and influential individuals
with the simple goal of consolidating their control over the nations of the
world and their resources. Our objective has to be as simple and must appeal to
people across the spectrum of political ideologies. In this third in a series
of articles about how to dismantle the New World Order, I consider how opinions
are formed and use my experience as a psychotherapist to explain how even
deeply held beliefs can be challenged and changed.</i></b><i><br />
<br />
</i><br />
<br />
Listening to self-identified “liberals” and “conservatives” debate, it almost
seems like you are listening to people who live in different worlds. In a very
real sense, they do. That is because each of us exists within a mental reality
we construct based on concepts we acquire early in life and that far too often,
we do not challenge. The more divergent our most fundamental beliefs are, the
more it seems that we are speaking in different languages when we try to
discuss politics. The solution is not to avoid the subject, but to recognize
the source of these differences and try to find a common language with which to
discuss possible solutions to problems that affect us all.<br />
<br />
It helps to understand that we are fundamentally more alike than we are
different and that it is our commonalities that make us human. Thinking of
ourselves as humans first and members of any other group second helps us keep
in mind that we all share important basic values and concerns. We must use the
awareness of our common interests to stay focused on the task of building a
future in which all can thrive. Rather than fighting each other, we must
remember that our differences are a source of strength if we are willing to
listen to each other with respect, learn from each other and integrate diverse
points of view into a formulation of a problem that we can agree on. If we then
put ideology aside and develop common strategies based on shared goals and values,
it is possible to change the world. We have to try, because the alternative is
almost certainly the self-destruction of human civilization.<br />
<br />
We are all born into a world that is an undifferentiated confusion of
sense
impressions. We only gradually come to make sense of it by forming
concepts
that approximate what we perceive and experience. When a young enough
child
sees something round, it sees “a ball.” It doesn’t matter if the round
thing is
a baseball or a basketball. The concept serves the purpose well enough
until
the child is old enough to understand that various balls are used in
different
sports for specific reasons. But what if a child looks at the sun and
sees only
a ball? It certainly looks round. The child has to learn to develop more
sophisticated concepts about round things to understand how an
apparently round object
that they cannot touch is fundamentally different from the “ball” it
resembles. Understanding such differences is essential to building a
personal model of reality that corresponds to "objective" reality as
defined by logical conclusions based on observations and the
applications of internally consistent theories about the world.<br />
<br />
So it is with all simple concepts. As we grow and acquire more
information, we
have to modify and refine the concepts by which we construct our views
of
reality. Failing to do so in a changing world leads to increasing
divergence
between our personal world and objective reality. When people who
disagree start to rely on ideological arguments that conflict with
observable fact, the collective consciousness becomes literally
"schizophrenic" in the sense that it is a "split mind." That is the key
to
understanding why those who think themselves liberals and conservatives
really
do live in different universes. Only when they find a common language to
share
their world views can they come to a common understanding of how the
world
works and how we can change it together.<br />
<br />
The fundamental obstacle to people uniting around common values and goals is
the nearly universal conservative impulse. Far from being unique to those who
identify as conservatives, it is based on a fear of change that most of us have
whether we are conscious of the prejudice or not. Any psychotherapist knows
this from experience. Many if not most of the people we work with come to us
with problems so painful that they are willing to ask for help, yet seem to
reject any suggestion that solving the problem requires sometimes painful
questioning of basic philosophical beliefs that form the core of their
identities.<br />
<br />
This tendency is of course even more pronounced in those who blind themselves
to the fact that they are in pain. It is even harder to address this pain when the
individual insists that he must solve all his problems on his own. At least
those who seek help in psychotherapy have taken the first steps of admitting
that they have a problem they cannot solve on their own and are willing to seek
help thinking through the problem from another person’s perspective. When
therapists encounter what they call “resistance” from those who find it
difficult, they may throw up their hands and place the blame on the patient.
However, the effective ones try to find ways to help motivate patients to
change. That is the essential task we face in awakening our fellow citizens to
what they have to do to change the political reality that is the ultimate
source of our pain.<br />
<br />
The first step in establishing dialogue between people of different political
philosophies is to abandon the notion of “conservative” and “liberal.” As soon
as you label yourself, you start to see people who see things differently as
“the other.” You attribute beliefs to them that they may not hold, at least
when their beliefs are held up to close questioning. When we try to talk to
each other in a friendly and nonjudgmental manner about our differences, we are
showing that we are not engaged in a contest of wills but seeking genuine
understanding. If we manage to communicate our desire to work together toward
common goals based on common values, we have the basis for healing the
artificial left-right split. <a href="http://www.soldiersforpeaceinternational.org/2011/07/across-great-divide.html">This is the Great Divide that keeps us fightingeach other instead of the common enemy</a>: the economic elite who would have us
become their slaves in a permanent fascist New World Order.<br />
<br />
Thanks to a corporate media and the politicians whose interests it serves, the
concepts of “conservative” and “liberal” have been turned on their heads.
Traditionally, the intellectual defense of conservatism was the belief that
radical change can lead to chaos and the loss of all the gains that have been made
in creating governments more responsible to the needs of the people who form
them. It is based in part on the idea that everyone is inherently corruptible,
or at least those who seek the power to determine the destiny of nations and
the world. <br />
<br />
There is a logical basis for this fear, given lessons of history. However,
thanks to the politics of division and corporate media and politicians that
frame political debate to serve the interests of their wealthy patrons, most
people who consider themselves conservatives today have supported the most
radical turn away from representative democracy to date. Those most
dissatisfied with the results not only blame “liberal” politicians and their
supporters but fault the party most have supported for years because they do
not think they favor change that is radical <i>enough.<br />
<br />
</i>Modern liberalism has been as drastically perverted. With the Democratic
Party moving ever closer to outright support of fascist policies in an attempt
to appeal to what the corporate media defines as the political center, it is
gradually moving that illusory center away from the ideal of representative
democracy and toward an ever more powerful plutocracy. The effect is to have turned traditional
liberalism into its antithesis. Instead of realizing that radical change has
become imperative, they seen content with the incremental efforts of a corrupt
party that claims to challenge the economic elite while voting to support it on
nearly every issue where the corporate interest conflicts with that of We the
People. <br />
<br />
This can only end when partisan Democrats learn to question their deeply held
belief that if and only if they can elect more Democrats can the country be
saved from the depredations of a wealthy and powerful aristocracy that has in
fact gained control over both parties. As with the Tea party movement, liberals
most angry at the direction the country has taken have taken to actively
opposing the Democratic Party. They blame the stubborn refusal of the rank and
file to hold their leaders accountable for the miserable state of what passes
for liberalism in America. In their ridicule of all Democrats, they fail to
acknowledge the legitimacy of trying to work within the system for those who
choose to do so. Instead, they are abandoning the political process altogether
or forming an ever-expanding array of third parties that further divide their cause
because they cannot seem to work together.<br />
<br />
<br />
Fortunately, psychotherapy offers a way to resolve the conflicts between political
reality and the way most people perceive it, whether they consider themselves
liberal, conservative or neither. The trick to dealing with the patient who
resists examining their own role in creating their problems is first establish
rapport, then help them explore their beliefs. If those which are healthy and
life-affirming can be shown to be incompatible with those more deeply held, one
of the beliefs must change. If the
person is capable of honest self-reflection, the healthy belief will be
retained and beliefs based on cognitive distortions will be rejected. As a
result, the belief system itself changes. <br />
<br />
The alternative is to distort information that reveals the contradiction so
that one can resist that change. Either way, being aware of two contradictory
beliefs simultaneously creates a form of anxiety known as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance">cognitive dissonance.</a> It is the reason <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_Emotive_Behavior_Therapy">Albert Ellis' rational emotive therapy</a> technique works. In RET, the
therapist’s job is to help the patients look at their lives objectively so that
they may choose to change rather than resist it at a cost to not only their
psychological integrity but their happiness. When the therapist succeeds at
helping the patient see the connection between the simplistic beliefs that made
the world make sense to the child and the problems they experience when they
try to hold onto these beliefs as adults, it is possible to help them find more
nuanced ways to view the world that are consistent with their core values.</div>
<br />
I will not go into the basic differences in the modern conservative and modern
liberal mind sets. I have little to add to George Lakoff’s description of the
one as favoring a stern, paternal view of government that encourages individuals
to succeed on their own in a rigged system and the other as favoring a
nurturing, cooperative society with a prominent role for government. I suggest
that those interested in exploring these ideas read his excellent treatise <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Think-Elephant-Debate-The-Progressives/dp/1931498717"><i>Don’t Think of an Elephant</i></a><i>.</i> What is more important is what he <i>doesn’t</i> say, which is how to reconcile
these different world views. That requires focusing not on the differences in
the beliefs we are raised with, but the ideals we were all taught to regard as
sacred. Among these are the principles of representative democracy and liberty
and justice for all. While concepts of
these ideals differ, there is nearly unanimous agreement that they are thwarted
by a system that is deeply corrupted by special interests. <br />
<br />
By framing our common interest as ending the corruption that is threatening
America and the world, we can find a way to talk to each other about how to
create a united national and international front against fascism, even if we
choose not to put it in those terms. How we might best have that discussion
will be the topic of a future essay on tactics for conducting a nonviolent,
democratic revolution.<br />
<br />
Previous essays in this series are here:<br />
<br />
Part I: <a href="http://www.soldiersforpeaceinternational.org/2013/09/toward-strategy-for-dismantling-new.html">Toward
a strategy for dismantling the New World Order</a><br />
Part II: <a href="http://www.soldiersforpeaceinternational.org/2013/10/setting-goals-for-real-global-revolution.html">Setting
goals for real global revolution</a>NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03499454400310101800noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4272948272257156976.post-72399490265491931722014-01-04T17:24:00.002-08:002014-01-04T17:24:20.870-08:00Building the Good Society<div id="stcpDiv" style="left: -1988px; position: absolute; top: -1999px;">
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<h4>
Commons Magazine</h4>
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<img alt="On the Commons" height="67" id="logo" src="http://onthecommons.org/sites/all/themes/allmende/img/logo.png" width="576" /><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">Commons Magazine</span></h2>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">Commons Magazine</span></h2>
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<br />
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<a href="http://onthecommons.org/magazine/building-good-society" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: x-large;">Building the Good Society</span></a></h2>
<div class="summary">
Notes toward a political platform for the commons</div>
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| by Jay Walljasper<br />
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<span class="only-vocabulary-1"><span class="term-1252"><a href="http://onthecommons.org/magazine/economy-and-markets">Economy and Markets</a></span>, <span class="term-1254"><a href="http://onthecommons.org/magazine/international">International</a></span>, <span class="term-1259"><a href="http://onthecommons.org/magazine/politics-and-government">Politics and Government</a></span></span></div>
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<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
It’s wonderful to have your fondest hunches
confirmed by a close-to-home source. When speaking and writing about the
future of the commons movement, I frequently note that many people
understand the principles of the commons, even if they don’t know the
word. I recently republished an <a href="http://www.utne.com/community/a-quality-of-life-checklist.aspx?PageId=1#axzz2hG1Cbwpr">article</a>
about the commons that appeared in Utne Reader magazine 12 years
ago—written at a time when I was unfamiliar with the concept myself.
Here’s another article I published at the same time about what it would
take to create a truly good, democratic society. In re-reading the
article, I saw that this list comes pretty close to defining a political
platform for the commons in the U.S.<br />
<br />
Here’s the article as it <a href="http://www.utne.com/community/the-good-society.aspx#ixzz2lhhngiWu">appeared</a> in the March-April 2001 edition of Utne Reader. —Jay Walljasper<br />
<br />
<br />
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(Photo by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/brettdavis/">Brett Davis</a> under a Creative Commons:“license”:http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ from flickr.com)<br />
<br />
</div>
</div>
<b>Universal health care:</b> This would include natural health treatments
and psychological therapies, both of which save money over the long haul
by preventing serious medical conditions.
<br />
<br />
<b> A fair electoral system:</b> How about a voting system in which the guy
who gets the most votes wins? Even better would be proportional
representation (common outside the English-speaking world), which allows
third and fourth parties to bring fresh ideas into the political debate
without becoming spoilers.
<br />
<br />
<b>Full employment:</b> Any society that glorifies work as much as we do
ought to offer every citizen the chance for a worthwhile job. Even in a
recession, there are slums to fix up, trees to plant, and the
unfortunate to care for.
<br />
<br />
<b> Far more federal spending on schools than on the military:</b> Education
is a better national security investment than weapons and warriors. The
popular T-shirt says it all: “It will be a great day when our schools
get all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to
buy a bomber.“
<br />
<br />
<b>A 6-to-1 ratio between the highest-and lowest-paid employees in any
enterprise:</b> This might have the added benefit of coaxing some of our
more greedy and ostentatious billionaires to relocate in the
Cayman Islands.
<br />
<br />
<b>Four weeks paid vacation for all:</b> A movement is already under way to
give Americans the same kind of free time that Europeans, Australians,
and the Japanese enjoy.<br />
<br />
<b>A hummable national anthem:</b> Ours isn’t so bad for an old battle poem
plastered atop an English beer hall tune, but it’s time for an anthem
more people are willing to sing. Maybe “This Land Is Your Land” or “All
You Need Is Love.“
<br />
<br />
<b>A strongly unionized workforce:</b> From weekends off to civil rights
legislation, labor unions have been the sparkplug of significant social
improvements. The right-wing drift of recent decades can be attributed
more to the decline of labor’s power than to the fading of
1960s radicalism.
<br />
<br />
<b>Natural and historic preservation:</b> More parks, wilderness areas,
wildlife refuges, historic districts, and generous tax credits for
saving scenic landscapes and landmark buildings.
<br />
<br />
<b>Unstinting support for the arts, humanities, and basic science:</b>
Think of tango festivals, touring comedy revues, cool museums (Gloria
Steinem’s girlhood home in Toledo?), and new revelations about dinosaurs
and dogwood blossoms.
<br />
<br />
<b>Topflight public broadcasting free of corporate purse strings:</b>
Imagine great investigative reporting, live poetry slams and salsa
shows, original dramas by emerging literary talents, and humor of all
varieties. Like the best of BBC, but in the many accents of America.
<br />
<br />
<b>Diversity. Character. Color. Charm.</b>
Scrap the melting pot and grab a
stew pan so we can savor all of America’s spicy flavors. Let West
Virginia celebrate its Appalachian splendor, Detroit its
African-American and Arab-American heritage, Boulder (and Halifax) its
burgeoning Buddhist sensibility, and Gilroy, California, its
famous garlic.
<br />
<br />
<b>Greater global awareness:</b> We give shamefully small amounts of
nonmilitary aid to poor nations around the planet even as U.S.
corporations exploit their people and environment. Adding insult to
injury, many Americans show little interest in anything happening beyond
our borders. We’re losers in this situation too, missing out on great
ideas from other cultures that could help solve some of our own problems
here at home.<br />
<div class="tags">
<h4>
Tags</h4>
<div class="tags-2">
<span class="only-vocabulary-2"><span class="term-3183"><a href="http://onthecommons.org/category/tags/utne-reader">Utne Reader</a></span>, <span class="term-3182"><a href="http://onthecommons.org/category/tags/commons-political-platform">commons political platform</a></span></span></div>
Posted November 25, 2013<br />
</div>
NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03499454400310101800noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4272948272257156976.post-17686285658471484052013-12-30T21:57:00.002-08:002013-12-30T21:57:45.284-08:00Major Social Transformation Is a Lot Closer Than You May Realize<br />
<a href="http://dissidentvoice.org/"><img alt="Dissident Voice: a radical newsletter in the struggle for peace and social justice" height="200" src="http://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/themes/dissident/images/header.jpg" width="760" /></a><br />
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<div class="postFull" id="post-52397">
<h2 class="title">
<span style="font-size: x-large;">Major Social Transformation Is a Lot Closer Than You May Realize</span></h2>
<h2 class="subhead">
<span style="font-size: large;">How Do We Finish the Job?
It starts with winning over the hearts and minds of the American people.</span></h2>
<div class="subhead">
<br /></div>
<div class="byline">
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / December 30th, 2013</div>
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<div class="entry">
The current social movement that exploded onto the national scene
with the 2011 Occupy Movement is following the path of successful
movements so far. The social movement in 2014 is poised to begin an
exciting era of broadening and deepening the growing consensus for
social and economic justice.<br />
<br />
This week, our article for the end of 2013 focuses on where we are,
i.e. at what stage of the progression of social movements do we find
ourselves; and broadly outlines the next steps. Next week, our article
for the new year will look more specifically at the tasks ahead for the
movement in 2014 and beyond.<br />
<br />
Successful people-powered movements follow a similar arc of development. The best description comes from Bill Moyer’s <a href="http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/moyermap.html">The Movement Action Plan</a>:
A Strategic Framework Describing The Eight Stages of Successful Social
Movements. We believe this is essential reading for activists and
include <a href="http://www.popularresistance.org/category/strategize/">a link</a> to it on the strategy page on Popular Resistance. Moyer expanded this 1987 article into, <a href="http://www.newsociety.com/Books/D/Doing-Democracy"><em>Doing Democracy</em></a>, a book published in 2001, a year before he died. You can see a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17iITob04t4">video of Bill Moyer’s last public presentation</a>
where he summarized the insights of his lifetime about how social
movements grow and succeed, and about his vision of a new culture
emerging through the cracks of a declining empire.<br />
<br />
Moyer’s work is heartening for social justice activists because it
shows how movements grow, recede and change their functions at different
stages. By understanding the current stage of development we can better
define the work that must be done to achieve success and predict how
the power structure and public will react to our actions. Moyer worked
with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference on poverty campaigns. He also worked on a variety of causes
over his nearly 50 year career in social movements.<br />
<br />
In <a href="http://clearingthefogradio.org/monday-dec-23-how-close-is-the-us-to-real-social-transformation/">a recent conversation</a>, Ken Butigan, a <a href="http://paceebene.org/ken-butigan">peace and justice activist</a>
who worked with Moyer, told us that Moyer wrote the first draft of the
Eight Stages of Successful Social Movements when he was jailed with more
than 1,400 people protesting the Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant in 1977.
Butigan explained that one reason Moyer wrote the Eight Stages was so
people involved in movements would not despair when the movement did not
immediately succeed and seemed to disappear without success. These are
expected stages of development. Just as we would not expect a 4th grader
to be doing calculus, we cannot expect a social movement to jump from
Stage 2 to the success of Stage 7. Each step in the process serves an
important role.<br />
<br />
<strong>This Historic Moment</strong><br />
<br />
Using the Movement Action Plan as a guide, we see that we are closer
to success than one might think. The Occupy Movement was Stage Four of
Eight. Moyer describes it:<br />
<blockquote>
New social movements surprise and shock everyone when
they burst into the public spotlight on the evening TV news and in
newspaper headlines. Overnight, a previously unrecognized social problem
becomes a social issue that everyone is talking about. It starts with a
highly publicized, shocking incident, a ‘trigger event’, followed by a
nonviolent action campaign that includes large rallies and dramatic
civil disobedience. Soon these are repeated in local communities around
the country. </blockquote>
Stage 4 is the “Social Movement Take-Off.” During Occupy, it seemed
that suddenly the unfair wealth divide, the corruption of Wall Street
and the dysfunction of government came into people’s consciousness.
These issues were discussed in the media and politicians started using
language to show they understood there was a problem. Prior to this,
these issues were largely ignored taboo topics that were not on the
political radar.<br />
<br />
In Stage 4, there are three concepts about which the public must be
convinced. The first was accomplished during Occupy, that is: <i>there is a problem that must be confronted.</i> We also began to accomplish the second concept: <i>current conditions and policies must be opposed</i>.
During later stages this second goal will be broadened and expanded.
The final concept – and this is still ahead of us– is that <i>people no longer fear the alternatives but want the alternatives put in place</i>.<br />
<br />
Throughout this process, the movement shows itself to be consistent
with the best ideals of the nation, e.g. democracy, equality, justice
and fairness; while the movement shows the power structure is out of
step with these ideals. The movement exposes the differences between
‘official policies,’ what the government says that it is doing, and
‘actual policies,’ what the policies actually accomplish, which is the
opposite of what they claim to accomplish.<br />
<br />
Stage 5 is a state of “Identity Crisis and Powerlessness.”
Participants feel like they failed and commentators say that the
movement is dead and accomplished nothing. Some of the people involved
in the Take-Off get burned out and suffer despair and hopelessness. In
fact, this is as natural as the receding of a wave and Moyer points out:
“The perception of failure happens just when the movement is
outrageously successful” because it raised the consciousness and
national awareness of a serious problem that was previously ignored.<br />
<br />
Moyer quotes the <i>I Ching</i> (Book of Changes), an ancient Chinese text which dates back to the 3rd or 2nd millennium BCE,for guidance. The <i>I Ching</i>
describes “Retreat” as a time of “an inner conflict based upon the
misalignment of your ideals and reality,” i.e. the unrealistic
expectation that long-term goals can be achieved immediately. This is a
“time to retreat and take a longer look to be able to advance later.”
We know many in Occupy who did just that before moving on to Stage 6,
where we are now.<br />
<br />
During the stage of Identity Crisis or Retreat, activists who step
back may realize we actually created a massive grassroots-based social
movement, put our issues on the agenda and gained majority support for
many of our views. In addition, people began to learn of the enormity
of the problem, agonize over the suffering of the victims of the unfair
and corrupt economy and realize the complicity of people in power that
they trusted.<br />
<br />
The essential lesson of Stage 5 is that resistance from the power
structure is a normal stage of the process. When we step back and look
at the course of history, within the overall framework of change, the
movement is on the path to success. We need to understand “what the
powerholders already know – that political and societal power ultimately
lies with the people.”<br />
<br />
Often simultaneous with this feeling of powerlessness is Stage 6,
“Majority Public Support,” which is where we are right now. During the
current phase, the movement seeks to create broad and deep consensus
over the issues that have been raised in the “Take-Off.” Our job is to
win over the hearts and minds of the American people.<br />
<blockquote>
The movement must consciously undergo a transformation
from spontaneous protest, operating in a short-term crisis, to a
long-term popular struggle to achieve positive social change. It needs
to win over … an increasingly larger majority of the populace and
involve many of them in the process of opposition and change… The
majority stage is a long process of eroding the social, political, and
economic supports that enable the powerholders to continue their
policies. It is a slow process of social transformation that creates a
new social and political consensus, reversing those of normal times. </blockquote>
During this phase, the movement must transform from a “loose”
organizational model to an “empowerment” model. This requires more
structure but in order to be effective and create lasting change, it
must follow the principles of being “participatory democratic,
efficient, flexible, and capable of lasting over the long haul.” The
movement must avoid becoming a “professional opposition organization”
(i.e. avoid becoming part of the system or a member of the non-profit,
professional complex). The movement must avoid becoming a mainstream
group working for “achievable” reforms, focusing on elections and
partisanship; instead they must remain “principled dissent groups”
advocating for what is right, not what is possible, continuing to
protest and resist and be based in the grassroots. Leaders must be
“nurturing mothers, not dominant patriarchs.”<br />
<br />
The focus at this stage should be grass roots organizing to build a
broad-based pluralistic movement. The primary goals are educating,
converting, and involving all segments of the population through a
variety of means but most importantly through direct contacts at the
local level to show people how the big social injustices of our era –
the unfair and corrupt economy as well as the dysfunctional and corrupt
government – affect them directly. It is important during this phase
for the movement to continue to have nonviolent actions, rallies, and
campaigns, including civil disobedience at key points of time and key
locations – even though the size of protests will be smaller than during
the “Take-Off” phase.<br />
<br />
In addition to protest, opportunities need to be created for
widespread civic involvement in projects that put the people at odds
with the current system. These citizen involvement programs need to
reflect the movement’s values and goals and the full range of the new
world the movement wants to create. The movement should be putting forth
a bold vision, a new paradigm, and larger demands beyond mere reforms
of the status quo.<br />
<br />
Moyers describes a grand strategy that includes 12 phases that lead
to Stage 7, “Success.” Throughout this process it is important to
remember a movement is only as powerful as its grassroots base and
therefore must continue to nourish, support and empower that base.
During this phase the movement participants switch roles from being
“rebels” to being “change agents.” The 12 phases are to (1) Keep the
issues on the political and social agenda; (2) Win majority support
against current policies; (3) Cause powerholders to change strategy
although they do not solve problems; (4) Counter each change in strategy
by showing it is a gimmick, not a solution; (5) Push powerholders to
new strategies that take riskier positions and make it harder to hold
old positions; (6) Create strategic campaigns that erode support for the
powerholders; (7) Expand policy goals as the movement realizes the
problems are greater than was evident; (8) Develop stronger and deeper
opposition to current policies; (9) Promote solutions and a paradigm
shift; (10) Win majority support for the movement’s solutions; (11) Put
the issues on the political and legal agendas; (12) Finally, the
powerholders change positions to appear to get in line with public
opinion while attacking the movement and its solutions (e.g. passing a
Wall Street health law that claims to cover everyone while demonizing
single payer health care which would be universal as too extreme).<br />
<br />
Opposition to current policies will quickly grow to 60%, then rise to
70% or 75%. Support for the movement’s alternatives will grow more
slowly during this time, with the public split on the alternatives. The
movement must build public support for the alternatives to achieve
success.<br />
<br />
At this point, even though everyone wants the issue resolved, the
government is still unable to take action. As a movement reaches the end
of Stage 6, many powerholders begin to join the calls for change. As
elites defect to support majority opinion, the political price paid by
those who want to maintain unpopular policies exceeds their benefits and
creates a political crisis that leads to resolution.<br />
<br />
This leads to Stage 7: “Success.” The duration of Stage 6 is
unpredictable and can take years. Success can come in several ways (1) a
“dramatic showdown that resembles the ‘take off stage.’” There could be
a trigger and the movement needs to mobilize with broad popular
support. (2) A “quiet showdown” where the people in power realize they
can no longer continue the status quo and launch a face saving endgame
of “victorious retreat,” changing their policies and taking credit. (3)
Through “attrition” where the social, economic and political machinery
slowly evolve to new polices and conditions. The result is not
guaranteed when this process begins and the movement must continue the
struggle until the goals are won. Stage 8 defends the success and
begins the social movement again, focusing on the new injustices of that
era.<br />
<br />
<b>Applying the Model to the Current Social Movement</b><br />
<br />
In recent years there has been a global awakening of people
understanding that big finance capitalism’s neo-liberal model of
privatization and corporatization while defunding public programs and
cutting necessary services to people is the cause of economic inequality
and the failed economy. At the same time, the collapsing ecology of the
planet with mass extinctions, destruction of the oceans and environment
as well as the impacts of climate change have become evident to super
majorities. The inability of governments to respond appropriately to
these crises because they are corrupted by mega-banks and transnational
corporate interests has led to mass protests.<br />
<br />
A September <a href="http://www.popularresistance.org/study-in-recent-years-world-shaken-by-protests/">study of protests from 2006 to mid-2013</a>
found a rapid rise: “Our analysis of 843 protest events reflects a
steady increase in the overall number of protests every year, from 2006
(59 protests) to mid-2013 (112 protests events in only half a year).”
They found that what is driving protests are four inter-related issues:
economic justice and opposition to austerity, failure of political
systems, the injustice of global trade rigged for big business, and the
rights of people, e.g. indigenous, racial and ethnic groups, workers,
women, LGBT, immigrants and prisoners and the right to free speech and
assembly.<br />
Another study that <a href="http://www.popularresistance.org/mapped-every-protest-on-the-planet-since-1979/">mapped protests from 1979 to the summer of 2013</a>
graphically shows the intense increase in protests in recent years.
While there were protests against Thatcherism and during the break-up of
the Soviet Union as well as against the Iraq War, no period like the
last few years has had the intensity and breadth of protests at any time
in the last 30 years. It is visually evident in a dramatic,
interactive map of protests based on reports in the media (which we know
does not even cover most protests).<br />
<br />
This research, and so much more, indicates that the global protests
have passed Stage 4, the Take-Off phase. In our daily reporting of
movement news (<a href="http://www.popularresistance.org/daily-digest/">sign up for a daily digest of news here</a>) we have identified ten “fronts of struggle” in which sub-movements are very active. These include (1) mobilizing <a href="http://www.popularresistance.org/popular-resistance-newsletter-youth-can-handle-the-truth/">youth and students</a> and making education a human right, (2) confronting <a href="http://www.popularresistance.org/popular-resistance-newsletter-corruption-spurring-global-climate-revolt/">environmental</a> issues around <a href="http://www.popularresistance.org/tag/climate-change/">climate change</a>, extreme <a href="http://www.popularresistance.org/tag/energy/">energy</a> extraction, toxicity, <a href="http://www.popularresistance.org/tag/food-and-water/">food</a> and mass extinction, (3) creating a national <a href="http://www.popularresistance.org/tag/health-care/">healthcare</a> system based on single payer financing and human rights principles, (4) ending <a href="http://www.popularresistance.org/tag/homelessness/">homelessness</a> and creating affordable <a href="http://www.popularresistance.org/tag/housing/">housing</a>, (5) ending <a href="http://www.popularresistance.org/tag/poverty/">poverty</a> and creating a new <a href="http://www.popularresistance.org/tag/economic-democracy/">democratic economy</a> including confronting the <a href="http://www.popularresistance.org/tag/economy/">banking and finance</a> system and <a href="http://www.popularresistance.org/popular-resistance-newsletter-we-are-in-a-class-war/">unfair wages and inadequate employment</a>, (6) ending mass <a href="http://www.popularresistance.org/tag/criminal-justice-and-prisons/">incarceration, police abuse and the drug war</a>, (7) establishing <a href="http://www.popularresistance.org/tag/immigration/">immigrant</a> rights, (8) establishing <a href="http://www.popularresistance.org/tag/indigenous-rights/">indigenous sovereignty</a>, and (9) creating a fair <a href="http://www.popularresistance.org/popular-resistance-newsletter-making-this-our-moment/">global trade</a> system and (10) ending <a href="http://www.popularresistance.org/tag/wars-and-militarism/">war and militarism</a>. We cover all these fronts on <a href="http://www.popularresistance.org/">Popular Resistance</a>, and the links above are to <a href="http://www.popularresistance.org/category/newsletter/">weekly newsletters</a> that focused on them or to a series of articles on the issue.<br />
<br />
Bill Moyer describes mass movements as being made up of
sub-movements. These fronts of struggle combined together in a movement
of movements create the foundation of the mass movement on which we
will build to broaden and deepen the movement. The uniting theme for
these ten sub-movements is a united movement to end the rule of money so
the necessities of the people and protection of the planet come before
further enriching the wealthiest.<br />
<br />
The overarching theme of wealth inequality has already deepened. We
see it in the rhetoric of poll-sensitive politicians like President
Obama and Mayor-elect <a href="http://www.popularresistance.org/tag/de-blasio/">de Blasio</a>
(whether they do enough about the issue will be in large part dependent
on our actions); and we can see it in the criticism of trickle-down
economics by <a href="http://www.popularresistance.org/pope-francis-rips-capitalism-trickle-down-economics-to-shreds/">Pope Francis</a>. There is no question that <a href="http://www.popularresistance.org/the-year-in-inequality-lots-of-words-wheres-action/">the conversation brought to consciousness by Occupy</a> is continuing and deepening.<br />
<br />
Economist Dean Baker clarified something that most instinctively understand – <a href="http://www.popularresistance.org/inequality-government-is-perp-not-a-bystander/"> inequality is not happening by accident</a>.
It is happening because of policy choices made by those in office.
This includes trade agreements rigged for transnational corporations,
policies favoring big business over small businesses and entrepreneurs, a
tax system that protects the wealthiest–especially investors, patent
protections for pharmaceuticals that prop up inordinate profits and make
healthcare expensive for everyone, continued funding of big banks at a
cost of $85 billion a month while not funding a full employment economy
or necessary programs like food stamps, raising the budgets of the
military and weapons makers while at the same time cutting veterans and
government pensions and cutting necessary programs.<br />
<br />
Joel Bleifuss of <em>In These Times</em> describes this as a “<a href="http://www.popularresistance.org/precarious-democracy/">precarious democracy</a>”
where those in office answer to big business, rather than the people.
These are policy choices that a well-organized mass movement of people
power can change.<br />
<br />
Already, the movement is seeing success from its protests, not just in changing the conversation, but in affecting policy. <a href="http://dissidentvoice.org/2013/12/10-good-things-about-the-year-2013/">Medea Benjamin points out</a>
ten good things that happened in 2013 including stopping the war in
Syria, negotiations with Iran, push back on Obama’s drone murders and
opposition to the NSA spying program, among other things. While these
victories do not constitute our ultimate goals, they show that organized
people power is making a difference. They should encourage each of us
to increase our efforts to broaden and deepen the movement and to work
in solidarity on multiple fronts of struggle.<br />
<br />
<b>The Target of Our Efforts Is Mobilizing the People</b><br />
<br />
In the next article we will focus on objectives for 2014 as well as
areas where we need to focus our energy and activism. The challenges and
opportunities of the upcoming year are important and we can have some
important victories.<br />
<br />
Bill Moyer, in <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17iITob04t4">his final presentation</a>
on his Movement Action Plan, makes a crucial point that is often missed
by activists. The critical understanding we must embrace is that
organized people have the power to direct the government and the
economy. We need to understand that we are not a fringe movement, but a
movement in the center of the best ideals of the United States. That is,
we believe in a government that is truly run by the people, not by
elite corporate and wealthy interests; we believe in equality under the
law not special treatment for those who are politically connected and
abusive enforcement against certain communities; we believe in a fair
economy not one rigged for the wealthiest. This is what the majority of
American people believe, but those in power violate these principles.<br />
<br />
As we have written in <a href="http://www.popularresistance.org/history-teaches-that-we-have-the-power-to-transform-the-nation-heres-how/">previous articles</a>
on strategy to transform the nation, when a movement is able to
mobilize a small minority of the population in support of views held by a
majority of the people, they win. In fact, a review of the last 100
years of resistance movements found that <a href="http://www.popularresistance.org/video-nonviolent-resistance-becoming-increasingly-effective/">the people have never lost</a> in a dictatorship or democracy when 3.5% of the people are mobilized.<br />
<br />
Bill Moyer sharpens our task, telling us that <i>many activists
mistakenly think when they are protesting their target is the government
or a corporation when in fact the target is mobilizing the people</i>.
We want to show that there is an effective movement speaking to the
people’s concerns and putting forth views that they support. This is
especially true in the current stage where our task is to broaden and
deepen the movement through talking, often one-on one, with people in
our communities and creating a national consensus in support of our
goals.<br />
<div class="author">
Kevin Zeese, JD and Margaret Flowers, MD co-host <a href="https://www.facebook.com/ClearingtheFogRadioShow?ref=ts&fref=ts">Clearing the FOG</a> on We Act Radio 1480 AM Washington, DC, co-direct <a href="http://dissidentvoice.org/2013/12/major-social-transformation-is-a-lot-closer-than-you-may-realize/ItsOurEconomy.US">Its Our Economy</a> and are organizers of the <a href="http://october2011.org/">Occupation of Washington, DC</a>. <a href="http://dissidentvoice.org/author/kevinzeesemargaretflowers/">Read other articles by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers</a>.</div>
<div class="author">
<br /></div>
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This article was posted on Monday, December 30th, 2013 at 5:46pm and is filed under <a href="http://dissidentvoice.org/category/activism/" rel="category tag" title="View all posts in Activism">Activism</a>, <a href="http://dissidentvoice.org/category/class/" rel="category tag" title="View all posts in Classism">Classism</a>, <a href="http://dissidentvoice.org/category/activism/occupy-movement-activism/" rel="category tag" title="View all posts in Occupy movement">Occupy movement</a>. </div>
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NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03499454400310101800noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4272948272257156976.post-55837201755500671172013-12-06T22:35:00.004-08:002013-12-06T22:35:54.243-08:00Bye-bye, fake liberals: The Warren Democrats are winning!<h2>
<br /></h2>
<h2>
<span style="font-size: x-large;">SALON</span></h2>
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<span class="dateline">
<span class="toLocalTime" data-tlt-epoch-time="1386264780">Thursday, Dec 5, 2013 5:33 PM UTC</span> </span>
<br />
<h2>
<a href="http://www.salon.com/2013/12/05/bye_bye_fake_liberals_the_warren_democrats_are_winning/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: x-large;">Bye-bye, fake liberals: The Warren Democrats are winning!</span></a> </h2>
<h2>
</h2>
<h3>
<span style="font-size: large;">The backlash against an inane Op-Ed bashing
Elizabeth Warren shows that “economic populism” is the way forward
</span></h3>
<span class="byline"> </span><br />
<span class="byline"><a class="gaTrackLinkEvent" data-ga-track-json="["author", "click", "Joan Walsh"]" href="http://www.salon.com/writer/joan_walsh/" rel="author">Joan Walsh</a>
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<div class="topics">
Topics:
<a class="gaTrackLinkEvent" data-ga-track-json="["topic", "click", "third_way"]" href="http://www.salon.com/topic/third_way">Third Way</a>,
<a class="gaTrackLinkEvent" data-ga-track-json="["topic", "click", "elizabeth_warren"]" href="http://www.salon.com/topic/elizabeth_warren">Elizabeth Warren</a>,
<a class="gaTrackLinkEvent" data-ga-track-json="["topic", "click", "bill_de_blasio"]" href="http://www.salon.com/topic/bill_de_blasio">Bill de Blasio</a>,
<a class="gaTrackLinkEvent" data-ga-track-json="["topic", "click", "social_security"]" href="http://www.salon.com/topic/social_security">Social Security</a>,
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<a class="gaTrackLinkEvent" data-ga-track-json="["topic", "click", "liberals"]" href="http://www.salon.com/topic/liberals">Liberals</a>,
<a class="gaTrackLinkEvent" data-ga-track-json="["topic", "click", "populism"]" href="http://www.salon.com/topic/populism">Populism</a>,
<a class="gaTrackLinkEvent" data-ga-track-json="["topic", "click", "wsj"]" href="http://www.salon.com/topic/wsj">WSJ</a>,
<a class="gaTrackLinkEvent" data-ga-track-json="["topic", "click", "media_criticism"]" href="http://www.salon.com/topic/media_criticism">Media Criticism</a>, <a href="http://www.salon.com/category/news/" rel="tag">News</a>, <a href="http://www.salon.com/category/politics/" rel="tag">Politics News</a> </div>
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<a class="lightBox" href="http://media.salon.com/2013/12/elizabeth_warren3.jpg" title="Bye-bye, fake liberals: The Warren Democrats are winning!"><img alt="Bye-bye, fake liberals: The Warren Democrats are winning!" src="http://media.salon.com/2013/12/elizabeth_warren3-620x412.jpg" title="Bye-bye, fake liberals: The Warren Democrats are winning!" /></a><span class="caption">Elizabeth Warren <span class="photoCredit">(Credit: Reuters/Joshua Roberts)</span></span></div>
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I am
very late to the Third Way-trashing party, but that’s a story in itself.
I didn’t need to weigh in; progressives erupted in immediate backlash
at the group’s latest attack on “economic populism.”<br />
<br />
By now everyone knows that <a href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304337404579213923151169790">the pro-Wall Street wing of the Democratic Party attacked Sen. Elizabeth Warren</a>
and New York’s Mayor-elect Bill De Blasio in the Wall Street Journal
Tuesday, arguing that their “economic populism” was a “dead end” outside
of the midnight-blue communards of Massachusetts and New York City.<br />
<br />
Not only was Third Way’s argument immediately and widely debunked – Salon’s Elias Isquith did it very well <a href="http://www.salon.com/2013/12/03/the_wall_street_journals_pathetic_attack_on_elizabeth_warren/">here</a>
– but its domination by Wall Street became an issue in itself, thanks
to folks at Daily Kos and the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. <a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2013/12/04/elizabeth-warren-eyes-wall-streets-think-tank-ties/">Warren herself responded</a>
by asking Wall Street CEOs to voluntarily disclose their think tank
funding – without mentioning Third Way by name – suggesting it amounted
to “little more than another form of corporate lobbying.”<br />
<br />
And by Wednesday evening centrist Pennsylvania Rep. Alison Schwartz, a Third Way co-chair who’s running for governor next year, <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2013/12/elizabeth-warren-democrats-feud-100678.html?ml=po_r">had disavowed the group’s attempted takedown of her party’s populist wing, calling it “outrageous.”</a> (Update: Thursday afternoon another co-chair, Rep. Joe Crowley, <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/05/joe-crowley-third-way_n_4392170.html">joined Schwartz.</a>)<br />
<br />
Oh, and meanwhile, <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/12/04/the-best-speech-obama-has-given-on-the-economy/">President Obama gave his best economic speech yet</a>, calling income inequality “the defining challenge of our time.”<br />
Is
something going on here? I’d say yes. Wall Street’s domination of the
Democratic Party is facing a genuine and sustained fight, and that’s a
good thing for Democrats and the country.<br />
<br />
<div class="toggle-group target hideOnInit" data-toggle-group="story-13550041">
Remember, it was only last year that <a href="http://www.salon.com/2012/04/16/which_way_for_obama/">Third Way made big news</a>
warning that ol’ devil economic populism would be a dead-end for Obama.
No, it was worse than that: Third Way said its polling showed that
Obama’s message of “fairness” was a loser; voters preferred to hear
about “opportunity.” Fairness, people. They came out against a
“fairness” message as too radical. Liberals debunked the poll, but Third
Way got a big endorsement from the New York Times columnist Bill
Keller, who used the group’s faulty data to warn Obama that he was
turning off independents by being “a plutocrat-bashing firebrand” and
pushing “Robin Hood” politics like the Buffett Rule.<br />
<br />
In fact, <a href="http://www.salon.com/2012/04/16/which_way_for_obama/">as I argued back then</a>,
during Obama’s first term his political fortunes improved when he
strengthened his message of economic populism, and plummeted the more he
preached about bipartisan deficit-cutting and “shared sacrifice” as
defined by plutocrats. If Third Way and Bill Keller were right, we’d be
debating President Mitt Romney’s new tax cuts for the wealthy right now.<br />
<br />
Of
course Third Way wasn’t right. But there didn’t used to be a penalty
for being wrong in the service of Wall Street’s agenda. Now its
plutocracy-defending drivel is both debunked quickly and denounced by
politicians – even the one it’s trying to demonize.<br />
<br />
That Elizabeth
Warren is a great tonic for the Democratic Party is not news (although
her decision to attack Third Way’s donor base rather than quail at its
attacks merits attention and more admiration). What seems new to me is a
sustained feistiness among progressives. The push to expand rather than
cut Social Security is already widening the debate and making it harder
for any Democrat to fearlessly back even hidden cuts like the chained
CPI. And the wave of fast-food strikes and Wal-Mart protests is
channeling the anger and moral outrage that inspired Occupy Wall Street,
and then seemed to dissipate, into a policy agenda.<br />
<br />
Which brings
me to the president’s speech. He gave a similar one in the wake of the
Occupy uprising, in Osawatomie, Kan., two years ago this Friday, and yet
it’s been hard to translate his rhetoric into change. I find it hard
these days to get excited about speeches, and yet, given the Republican
extremism that’s led to gridlock, that bully pulpit is one of Obama’s
most effective tools, and he doesn’t always use it to advantage. He did
on Wednesday.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.latimes.com/nation/politics/politicsnow/la-pn-obama-income-inequality-speech-20131204,0,4212383.story#ixzz2mcTo5reP">Obama called the “growing deficit of opportunity”</a>
a greater threat than the “rapidly shrinking” fiscal deficit. That’s
important as Democrats face down Republicans in budget talks. And more
vividly than before, he showed how the country’s post-World War II
investments in building a middle class created a wider prosperity, while
our current 40-year experiment with austerity and tax cuts has cut the
heart out of the American dream.<br />
<br />
Republicans and Fox News are
already attacking the president’s speech as “class warfare,” and that’s
fine. We’ve been living through class war for the last few decades, but
only one side bothered to fight. For a time they enlisted a lot of
Democrats, including Obama. Most people — not only progressives, even
some Tea Partyers who aren’t driven by racism — know that Obama’s
administration bailed out banks, but not their victims. Yet pampered CEO
crybabies responded to the president’s mild chiding over their obscene
bonuses and renewed profiteering by <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/08/16/steven-schwarzman-obama-a_n_683178.html">comparing him to Hitler</a> and funneling their cash to Mitt Romney.<br />
<br />
Now,
with income inequality continuing to worsen on Obama’s watch, he has to
pick a different side in the class war if he cares about his legacy. I
hope that’s what the speech Wednesday was about. I trust that an
energized progressive movement, and its congressional allies, can hold
him to it. We’ll see. But the energetic backlash against Third Way shows
that economic populism isn’t a dead end but the way forward.<br />
</div>
<a class="toggle-group toggleOnScroll trigger remember refreshAds gaTrackPageEvent" data-delay="15" data-toggle-group="story-13550041" href="http://www.salon.com/2013/12/05/bye_bye_fake_liberals_the_warren_democrats_are_winning/">
</a> </div>
<div class="writerMeta">
<a href="http://www.salon.com/writer/joan_walsh/" title="Joan Walsh">
<img alt="Joan Walsh" class="writerImage" id="writer-10004425" src="http://media.salon.com/2011/09/JoanWalshSquare-75x75.jpg" title="Joan Walsh" /> </a>
Joan Walsh is Salon's editor at large and the author of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/1476733120/?tag=saloncom08-20">"What's the Matter With White People: Finding Our Way in the Next America."</a> <a class="byline" href="http://www.salon.com/writer/joan_walsh/" title="More Joan Walsh.">
More Joan Walsh.
</a>
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NOTES FROM THE WILDSIDEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03499454400310101800noreply@blogger.com0