Do you think that existing Democratic and progressive organizations suck? Do find them pathetic, ineffective, beholden to status quo power structures, and generally lacking in vision? Do you want to start your own organization to fill the vacuum created by this suckitude?
If so, then against my better judgment as an (occasionally) professional consultant, allow me to provide you with a free, five-step guide to creating your own progressive organization. You know, that organization that will be free of all the mistakes and errors that the pathetic, ineffective, sell-out organizations currently in existence keep repeating.
For less than $1,000 a month, you can provide yourself with all of the necessary tools to get your organization going. In the extended entry, I explain how.
"If a majority of workers want a union, they should get a union. It's that simple. We need to stand up to the business lobby and pass the Employee Free Choice Act. That's why I've been fighting for it in the Senate and that's why I'll make it the law of the land when I'm president of the United States." --Barack Obama
Nobody is making it the law of the land. Nobody is fighting for it. The Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) has drifted down to the bottom of the AFL-CIO's website, buried beneath good economic proposals which, however, do nothing to build a labor movement. EFCA is not to be found anywhere on the front page of Change to Win's website at all. The media's not smearing EFCA with U.S. Chamber of Commerce lies anymore. Congress and the White House are silent. Any escalation of pressure on senators from union members has never materialized, the polite letter-writing campaigns having drifted away rather than ramping up into pickets or sit-ins.
Two interesting dialogues resulted the other day in response to my post on the National Equality March, resource allocation, collective responsibility and moral hazard (both here and over at The Bilerico Project).
While I asked three questions in the post, nearly all of the conversation concerned just two. One concerned whether, given the other fights in Maine, Washington State and elsewhere, folks should direct their time and money towards the March, and encourage others to do so. The other concerned whether LGBT folks had a responsibility to drop what they were doing and help make sure the March was a success.
The third question didn't get as much play, it's been bothering me for several days, so I'd like to put it to you here.
Cleve announced this march idea on June 7th, proposed for October 11th. It received near-universal criticism and even many people privately and publicly asking for it to be called off, primarily for the resource allocation issues, and partly over questions re the cost-effectiveness. This proceeded for several months until conversations were had that amounted to "well, if this thing is going to happen, we might as well make sure we don't get embarrassed in front of a national audience if it's poorly organized/no one shows up." And so 140 "leaders" in LGBT world, along with HRC and NGLTF, after three months of refusing to, endorsed the March publicly. It represented a tipping point.
Now we come across the question of how those people, along with others who outright opposed the March, have to contribute. Some of the best minds in our movement, particularly in the media training world, PR world, fundraising and logistical organizing, have rightly complained they have to drop what they are doing and make sure an idea they opposed from the start is a success. Some have privately told me they're even even being asked to do so without any compensation at all by the March folks (and this is what they do for a living). It seriously angers me because it represents not just a lack of planning and a lack of fundraising to account for this, but because others are being forced to clean up after a poorly organized and pretty dumb idea. There are a lot of dumb ideas put forward in progressive politics, and we don't even realize how many we dismiss/ignore- some even put forward here at OpenLeft. Now imagine having to work to execute the ones you opposed as part of your day job.
So, my question is how to keep this from happening again. The en masse endorsements created a serious moral hazard question for the future. They insulated Cleve and his cohorts from the twin risks of (a) this effort failing and our movement being scoffed at on national TV by talking heads, lawmakers, and the general public (b) looking like fools for trying to throw it together in four months with poor planning and execution.
Let's imagine the next time any major name with a microphone and a following proposes a mass action that requires mass commitment of resources and, regardless of the success or failure, will receive intense media coverage. Let's imagine there is near-universal agreement that the idea is a stupid one. Let's imagine the proposed action affects everyone else in that issue space, be it environment, LGBT, or other, in terms of resource allocation and media perception. So there is a serious incentive for everyone opposed to it in that issue space to make sure it's either a success, or that it's called off.
If you're an organizer opposed to the mass action, how do you get it called off to prevent (a) a moral hazard issue that keeps any and every individual with a microphone and a following from proposing their random stupid ideas, and (b) forcing the best in that issue space to drop what they are doing and help with an idea they opposed in the first place?
... Young people, however, seem to have a special role to play. In many ways, to borrow a phrase from a fellow activist Ken Ward, we may be "the last generation."
Not the last generation on earth - - no doubt society will keep the babies coming until the very end. But maybe the last generation to see winter in Vermont (as I write, a slow drizzle has replaced the usual December snow), the last U.S. generation to grow up in a time of relative economic prosperity, or the last generation to live in a world not plagued by higher levels of disease. And in the face of all this, we're getting royally screwed by our governments. The Stern Report recently re-emphasized that the impact of global warming on the world economy will be like that of the Great Depression, World War I, and WWI . . . combined. Guess who's going to be paying for all of this out of pocket? ...
For all that Rep. Henry Waxman and Rep. Ed Markey tried, and of their sincerity I have no doubts, the current Waxman-Markey bill, The American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, or ACES, fails this Last Generation.
In opening my case, I yield the floor to Greenpeace USA Deputy Campaigns Director Carroll Muffett, who today said the following:
When I was in college, I used to drive down this quiet two-lane highway to Cincinnati. Cinci was the closest place from my small Midwestern college that was even close to happening. But the road was beautiful. Everything was laid out before you: old farmhouses, calm fields, large swaths of forest. That is, until you got about a half an hour outside Cincinnati, where the roadside became a crawling neon expanse of service stations and fast food chains. I tried to imagine how many people within a 30-mile radius really needed to eat hamburgers on a daily basis. Why'd they build so many of these places? It was just so unremittingly ugly.
I think about this a lot when I read all of the organized environmental arguments about why we need to do something about global warming - which of our practices cause the most greenhouse gases, the likely effects of doing nothing, the economic benefits of greening the economy, how to combat the powers that be, etc. -- and I'm on board with most of this analysis intellectually, no question.
But the thing I hear so rarely from environmental and political organizations (okay, excepting Bill McKibben and some other individuals), the simple gut-smacking truth outside all the facts and figures and political this-and-that, is how tragic it is that the way we've used land these last 50 years has turned one of the most extraordinary continents on the planet into something ugly to be around. And that right there is the connection between aesthetics and greenhouse gases. Because all this extra ugliness needs enormous amounts of carbon-spouting energy to run: factory farms to grow and harvest pesticide-infested food, buildings upon buildings to sell the food, energy from coal to power the buildings, fences upon fences to protect the buildings, cars upon roads under cars to get people to the buildings, drab, energy inefficient subdivisions to house the people in the cars, and electricity-sucking lights to keep it all illuminated (and the stars hidden from view).
Indeed, Adam Green has a point when he says that there wasn't a mass mobilization before the cramdown vote. Adam has years worth of great online mobilizing under his belt, and may have forgotten more about it than I will ever know, I'm not going to argue that point with him.
But for me, each new 'moderate'-led defeat under the glorious Democratic trifecta leaves me freshly wondering how much it's possible to reform such lousy human beings through public pressure. Because when I think of all the lousy people I have known in my life, none of them have changed just because I said I really wanted them to.
Neither are the voters Congress' parents, clergy, teachers, counselors, any of that. They aren't juveniles and we aren't responsible for their character.
They are independent moral agents and when they keep doing bad things that they bleeping well know screw over their constituents, they're responsible for those actions. Not me and you for failing to call their office or send them that email. Not the soulless mortgage banking lobbyist they had lunch with. Not consumer advocates for somehow failing to make a dent the last dozen times they briefed congresscritters and their staff on the Very Dire Straits of ordinary Americans.
It isn't that they have no principles. It's that they have bad ones, and they're doing exactly what they want to do.
There have been, and will be posts here on openleft, that call for real pressure, strong pressure, on the drive to 'reform' our healthcare system, and what that 'reform' should be.
But there have been no diaries, the frontpage thrust of the debate here at openleft is on the economy, the debates and calls to action, such as the necessary calls to primary those who stand ion the way on necessary legistation are on jobs and laws. There are calls to organize around accuracy in reporting, the history of progressives and Keysian economic plans, calls to reinstate civil rights protection and a threatening survielance society.
But the debate on healthcare is lacking.
That is a shame. This is the time for 'economic, jobs and worker rights progressives' to listen closely to what 'health progressives' are saying, have been saying, will be saying louder and louder in the months and years to come.
The opportunity, the responsibility, right now to act desicively is greater than at any other time in our history. The ongoing lurch of history will beging to have turbulence, the debates about other significant issues will heat up, the situations in other crisis will press for attention. Right NOW is the time.
My parents kind of get what I do. They have a sense of what blogs are and how they interact with the larger world of politics, though they don't read blogs (and definitely don't have user accounts). They have a sense, gleaned from the occasional New York Times article or conversation with one of my peers, that technology is tearing down barriers. But they probably haven't heard or used the term "gatekeeper" very often.
So Markos, thank you for writing a book for them.
Markos's new work, Taking On the System, is an exploration of how all of us have just been handed power...if we decide to grab hold. We can change media narrative by becoming our own media through blogging. We can become our own campaigns with simple cameras and free video hosting sites.
And it's not just in politics. Markos quite consciously weaves stories of other industries, most notably the music business, among his anecdotes from Senate campaigns, the anti-war movement, immigration rallies and other political efforts. In doing so, he creates an argument that doesn't just appeal to the political junkie but to anyone who wants to understand entrepreneurship, idea-generation and anti-authoritarianism in the digital era. He also does it in a well-written, fun, and at-times inspirational style that is full of examples and lessons, which are helpfully broken down into "rules."
My parents will understand the progressive movement -- and these times -- much better when they read it.
But it's not only aimed at the newcomer to these discussions.
Here's a list of people involved in politics, most of them prominent bloggers, some with other political accomplishments as writers and activists spanning decades, one (Jennifer Nix) a publisher responsible for helping bring two important voices to printed prominence--George Lakoff and Glenn Greenwald. So what do the following people have in common?
Chris Bowers Mike Lux Matt Stoller Jennifer Nix Pam Spaulding
Frederick Clarkson Howie Klein George Lakoff Brian Leubitz
Vincent Bugliosi Duncan Black Amanda Marcotte Rick Perlstein
Funny how it is such a waste of time to join a Facebook group, which took me roughly 30 seconds this morning, but apparently well worth the time to write paragraph after paragraph criticizing people for joining the group.
It reminds me of someone watching someone else playing a video game and then, after an hour or so, criticizing the video game player of wasting his time. Perhaps, sure, but not compared to the guy who didn't even play.
This could just be just another trivial example of the endless foibles of humanity. But I think there's something a bit more significant in the mix as well.
Since I've been to all three YearlyKos/Netroots Nation conventions, I can say that it has become almost a ritual.
Those of us in labor scratch our heads wondering why bloggers don't seem to read our diaries and send us to the top of the rec list.
"If they really care about labor, why doesn't the Netroots get more excited about our issues?" we ask.
Meanwhile, bloggers outside labor wonder what they can do to help us. Everyone I run into loves Labor, or at least recognizes how a strong labor movement helps the Progressive movement in general and, more specifically, Progressive candidates.
"How can we engage labor?" they ask. "What can we do to gain labor's support?"
Well, after three years at this sixth-grade dance -- where the boys and girls are still wondering if they should wait for the next song -- I think it's time to shake it up.
Chicago does not have rent control. In 1997, the Illinois legislature passed - and Republican Governor Jim Edgar signed - SB 531 (the Rent Control Preemption Act), which prohibited local jurisdictions from passing it. At the time, no city in Illinois had rent control - but the real estate lobby had a national effort to quietly stop it in places before it starts. SB 531 passed with little fanfare: the State House voted for it 96-18, and the State Senate approved it 46-6. One of the six senators who voted "no" was Barack Obama - although many liberal Democrats voted with landlords and the Senate's Republican majority. Obama's vote - when one considers how few people stood up with him - is an example of his core progressive principles. While it's valid to say that he should have done more to defeat it, consider that Obama was a freshman in a very hostile climate - and as a community organizer had learned to pick his battles.
Part of Living Liberally's mission has been to promote engagement and collaboration among progressive organizations. To fulfill this goal we at Living Liberally have decided to feature interviews with people involved in different parts of the progressive movement. Hopefully, through these interviews, we can learn about what progressives are working on today, and get a little more in depth about what its like to be a part of the progressive movement.
Our first interviewee, Daniel Mintz, is in Research and Development at progressive powerhouse MoveOn.org Political Action. He currently lives in Brooklyn and every once in a while shows up at the Original Drinking Liberally. Enjoy!
Seth Pearce: So, what did your parents say when your organization was condemned by the US congress? Daniel Mintz: I think, they, like a lot of people, were just blown away that with so many huge problems to tackle, the US Congress decided to spend so much time talking about a newspaper ad. Just like, whether you agreed or disagreed with the ad, what a manufactured controversy.
SP: What exactly do you do at MoveOn? DM: Officially, I'm in charge of Research and Development, which is to say that I'm the R&D; dept. (we're a pretty tiny shop). What that means in practice is that I get to have my hands in lots of cool stuff that we're trying out.
SP: Stuff John McCain would know how to use? DM: Not so much.
SP: People think of MoveOn as this big shadowy progressive organization, running some kind of secret progressive world order- what are some specific things that MoveOn is working on right now? DM: Ha. What are we working on right now?...Let's see...We're getting ready to run a massive get out the vote operation in the fall, hundreds of paid organizers working with tens of thousands of volunteers. We'll be essentially combining our 2004 program, Leave No Voter Behind, where people in swing states canvassed their neighbors, with our 2006 program, Call for Change, where MoveOn members across the country made more than 7 million calls to voters in key House and Senate races.
We're also working on FISA: Right now, we're asking thousands of MoveOn members to call their senators every day to tell them not to cave on the FISA "compromise".
And we're running a National Day of Action for an Oil-Free President at gas stations across the country in a few weeks. McCain is pretty darn tight with Big Oil. Many of the more than 100 lobbyists associated with his campaign are lobbyists for Big Oil. We wanted to highlight those ties and push for our next president to free himself and us of our dependence on foreign oil. So we're holding hundreds of gas station rallies where thousands of MoveOn members will show up at local gas stations to rally and call for a real, progressive solutions to the energy crisis.
There is a fantastic book, "Timequake" by Kurt Vonnegut, which much like anything this writer ever wrote, has warm humorous instructive observations for anyone lucky enough to have a copy in their hands. I always feel like I have discovered secrets I should have already known, and lies that I can the feel the truth in.
This book like Great American Fiction from Mark Twain, with wry humor and sad hope plots a description of our times, as clear as a diagnosis as cruel as a post mortem. With it in mind, a narrative for progressives to organize our actions around seems more than possible, it demands like a unavoidable call to action.
Click through and see fate and history, humor and courage, discovery and awakening plot a progressive parable of action.
The 2008 election presents an incredible opportunity for Democrats to take control of our government and build the foundation for a long lasting progressive movement in our country. But to win in November, we will have to contend with a desperate Republican Party that has repeatedly demonstrated its willingness to divide and deceive the American people for their own partisan gain. To cut through all of the GOP propaganda, Faux News misinformation campaigns and right-wing radio hate speech Democrats are going to have to get out and talk face-to-face with voters about our vision for America and how we will put this country back on track.
At 21st Century Democrats, we are working hard to play our role in the progressive infrastructure. We train activists in the art of field organizing and then put them on campaigns all across the country so they can go out and talk to voters about our candidates and our vision for the future. On June 4-8, we will hold our National Field Organizer Training: Major League Action at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. Over four days of intensive training, we will transform up to 200 activists into prepared field organizers that can be dropped anywhere in the country and start making a difference right away.
You can learn more about our MLA training here.
Or, if you're all ready to go and would like to reserve a spot in the training you can register here!
Our organization seeks to build a more progressive America not only by electing more progressive Democrats, but also by building human capital within the progressive community. Training a young person to be a field organizer helps us not only in the current cycle, but gives that person a skill that will be valuable in every election. Thankfully, there are a lot of great groups like The Center for Progressive Leadership, Democracy For America, The New Organizing Institute, Wellstone Action! and many others that train progressive activists, organizers and candidates.
If you want to get more involved with the election this year and build some organizing skills for the future, please consider attending our Major League Action Training and/or one of the other great trainings put on by our progressive allies. Or, if you can't make it and would like to help pay the travel expenses and registration fees for a dedicated young progressive to attend our training you can donate to our Field Organizer Fund. The better we are at finding and talking to our neighbors about the issues that are important to them, the more successful we will be in November and the more likely we are to build a true progressive movement in this country.
Mark Lotwis is the Executive Director of 21st Century Democrats.
Post, 3/15/08, lead story: "The Federal Reserve took the extraordinary step yesterday of providing emergency funding to one of Wall Street's venerable firms, Bear Stearns, after it ran out of cash to repay its lenders....The Fed's action...is one of the most significant government efforts to save a private firm in modern times."
Hmmm. And the Fed thought this was more important than saving all the homeowners who are being foreclosed in the mortgage crisis that led to the threat to Bear Stearns?
And the Bush Administration thought this was more important than either holding down the price of $108/barrel oil, or - better yet, from my point of view - capturing some of those super-profits and plowing them back into energy efficiency like more transit and green jobs and rebuilding our cities instead of sprawling out to Nunavut?
Or ending the three-trillion-dollar war in Iraq?
Or taxing hedge fund managers at a reasonable rate - people who make super-profits by inventing new and unregulated forms of investment that even Robert Rubin says he can't understand?
And Bear Stearns hasn't been known for its political contributions? 7th in the securities industry in the last ranking I found at OpenSecrets, http://www.opensecrets.org/ind...
To be fair, I do have to give the Post a bit of credit: here's how it's many-inch article ends: "In 1998, the New York Fed cajoled all the large Wall STreet firms into buying up assets of the failed hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management to avert a global financial meltdown. All the large firms, that is, except one, which refused to participate: Bear Stearns."
I hope progressive politicians and organizations hit hard on why bailing out a multi-billion dollar fund of the super-wealthy is urgent economic politics, but extending unemployment benefits, or state Medicaid assistance, or forcing banks to renegotiate balloon mortgages, is not.
We need public policies that invest in America's future, and that isn't limited to the richest 1% of the world's population.
Over at TPM Cafe, Nathan Newman has a piece, "Long-Range Vision of the Labor Movement", that talks about one of the ways in which labor is rebuilding itself, particularly in California. It's by maximizing bargaining power:
For many years (and sometimes now), many people treated my optimism about the long-term strength of the labor movement as somewhat delusional, but having been in and around it now for twenty years -- okay, that number makes me feel old -- what's been clear to me is that watching the overall membership numbers year to year was not representative of the long-term planning that would payoff only over time.
It helped that I spent the 1990s in California where some of that innovation was most dramatic in the labor movement-- and the results have been a massive revival of union strength in that state. 200,000 union members were added in California alone last year. And this is based on a labor vision that had ten-year horizons for organizing, a level of long-term investment that few American institutions have been willing to make. One piece of evidence-- a coming showdown in California between the health care unions and the industry that was literally ten years in the making:
For the first time, nearly 200 contracts are set to expire in the same year, giving [United Healthcare Workers] extraordinary strength at the bargaining table...The plans for this campaign began 10 years ago, with union leaders lining up contract dates to maximize their power as healthcare workers.
So 75,000 hospital and nursing home workers covered by nearly 200 separate union contracts have been moved from fighting individual battles into a united force that can demand better working conditions and better care for their patients.
This is a highly significant development, as can clearly be seen by realizing how relatively rare this practice has long been. Newman goes on to talk about another such long-term effort on behalf of the Hotel Workers, and concludes:
Not that all unions have the long-term vision needed, but there's been an almost Darwinian evolution in the union movement. Those unions without long-term vision have shrunk and those with long-term vision have grown and become more and more dominant.
So while the overall numbers of union members have not really grown in the last decade, the proportion of those numbers in unions likely to grow in the future has-- which makes the prospects for the labor movement as a whole far more promising in coming years than they looked a decade ago.
This sort of thinking was noticably absent in one of the most high-profile strikes of recent years in Southern California, the Grocery Workers strike back in 2003. This was an extremely costly strike for the supermarket chains, but it was confined to one part of the country, and so they were willing to take devasting losses in the short term for the prospects of drastically slashing labor costs in the long run, so they would no longer sustain a middle class life-style--a strategy they could not have adopted if the strikes had been nationwide.
These struggles are vitally important for preserving the dream of a universal middle class. But Obama's leading economic advisor appears to have a major blind spot here. More on the flip...
Looking to get involved in progressive youth organizing?
I got a lot of emails from folks looking for job candidates, pimping conferences, and scouring or interns. It seemed to make sense for me to put out a call and compile as much as I could into on place. So here's a fairly comprehensive listing of all the jobs, internships, and conferences that can help you do it.
I hope folks find this valuable. Also, I'm pretty appalled that there is no central repository for stuff like this. There are places to go, sure - NOI's job boards, Idealist.org, Democratic GAIN, etc. but all of those seem somewhat incomplete and are hard to navigate. Building a real "youth movement job board" isn't at all a bad idea and it could probably be done super cheap if it was all done wiki style.
This morning, Democracy Now devoted a full program to the Jena Six, a group of black high school boys in Jena, Louisiana, charged with attempted murder, conspiracy and related charges that could put them in prison for up to 100 years for a schoolyard fight that ordinarily would be punished with suspension.
It occurred in the context of extreme racial tension, iniated when black high school students sat under a tree at school formerly used for shade exclusively by white students, and white students responded by hanging nooses from the tree. The white power structure alternately trivialized, ignored and exacerbated the situation until an opportunity arose to massively overcharge a group of black students who now face life in prison for what would normally be punished by a school suspension.
While the events in Jena (see below) are terrible, they are hardly unusual. Statistically, we know that hundreds of thousands of black and Latino men and women are in prison who would not be there if they were white. Usually, however, it is not so easy and clear-cut to see on ongoing situation in which biases involved are so nakedly and specifically displayed. And the nakedness of ths display creates an opportunity--not just to fight back in this instance, but to spearhead a broader fight for racial justice in the criminal justice system.
It is an opportunity, in particular, for predominantly-white sectors of the progressive blogosphere to work together bloggers of color and help bring attention and resources to bear in support of an isolated black community that desperately needs help and attention in fighting conditions that seem little changed since the 1960s.
In addition to direct support for the defendents specifically, and those fighting for them on the ground in Jena, calling for Congressional hearings would definitely be in order. (Contact info below)
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Talking Liberally Progressive Parley
