You and What Movement?

Derrick Jenson said that each of us has a part to play in making things better. For some, their role may simply be turning their heads. Naomi has been useful in the course of awareness to the schemes these corporate servants play in washington. Such as using, or even causing disaster to profit from. Furthermore, I am sure she feels the heat from the ones around her for speaking out. I say this has done more than many when it comes to putting your neck out. 

It may have been better to have Bush push the corporate agenda so far, as opposed to let Oboma let us believe that big change will occur. Now, we see the true face of capitalism, whereas we were not sure before. Oboma was choosen not by us, but by them to gloss up the bad image bush gave them. Oboma has voted in the past for everything Bush did. Notice the media liked him from the start, why?

I agree that you will not be able to to simply ask for the silver spoon from the wealth's mouth (or even the middle class who enable then). So continued action is the key. But talking about it to your neighbors helps as weel. We need all people, no matter what you can do to help.

Personally, I talk about civics (politics) when I shop, when at work, with customers, neighbors, and family. It feels right to speak out, it also feels lonely because people do not want to be confronted, to feel obligated, to feel ashamed. So it is benificial if it makes so many squirm.

Tony Orlando

Also think that voting for the lesser evil is wrong. It is like checking out an employer before you go to work for them; you check out thier history first. If everyone practiced common sense, and there was no good choice for the postion of public servant(presidentcy), then you do not vote. And if there are little or no one voting. Then this spaeks volumes about our country. Instead, people play these little games, and complicate things more then they need to be.

I suggested on public radio that we have lotteries, and not elections for selecting our public servants. This brings anyone to office reguardless to wealth, or education. We want your exsperience. This also eliminates the corruption of lobbyists, advertising campaigns, and so forth. It would also stir up excitement from the community, that we actually are addressing the people's intrests. But instead we fight over things that are despite the point. Nip the problem at the bud, I say.

I think left not only in US but in a lot of countries suffers from identity crisis .It is very tough period for leftist movement. Societies standards has changed and majority of people directly and indirectly are driven to a life style of higher per capita earnings which leads to more consumerism and this really shifts human beings priority as an individual and as a public participant as well. To me it seems one thing more problematic which also is paradoxical too in a way, how society is being manipulated by technology, why paradoxical? As much as we need advancement in technology to make life better but has become a tool and survival for capitalism and its resurrection.

Regardless of being Obama supporter or not, whoever believes structure of society needs to be overhauled, we should keep our eye on the ball. I have learned when you start to compromise your belief just to find alliance sometimes you end up in being swallowed.

People are very distracted with luxury of life, finding support in those categories is a tough call.

I have my hope in the idea that gradually capitalism will start eating itself from inside, I find it very hard to eliminate this monster just with social and leftist movement.  

Me thinks thou doth protest too much.  You seem to have taken this very personally and blamed the lack of an entire movement on Ms. Klein being out of touch.

She's travelled the entire world over the last 10 years, visiting with these impovershed people you claim to speak for, giving her films and books away for free to them.

Somehow equating the Obama voters as more genuinely fit to provide social change more than those that initiated the movement 10 years ago, without a charismatic leader to help them, is ridiculous.  No one says you can't have both, but you.  Couldn't help but the notice the resistance to white people also.  Some community organizing spirit.

That was a powerful response Al.

It makes sense that some of the college-educated whites (of which I am one) who did not actively participate (I am not a part of this group ;-)) in the community organizing and other activities during the primaries and general election feel adrift now. The game changed and now if you don't get off your duff and play you're marginalized on the sidelines because the rest of us won't just wait around to be told what to do or how to do it or what we should think and feel.

Sam - I am a "white person." And I happen to think that we have a special responsibility to push our brother and sister Caucasians to understand that, in the United States, the only movements that have been successful have been multi-racial movements. If after years of using the same stale tactics over and over again, a venture in political activism still has a largely homogenous group dominated by college-educated white folk sitting around the table, it has to acknowledge that it's not been effective, nor is it leading to any real change.

One of the first responsibilities of any authentic revolutionary or change-agent is to chart a course to victory. Politics has to be about more than self indulgence. If it's not about winning, it's a big waste of everybody's time, labor and resources. If anyone feels defensive when I or others say that single-race movements are doomed from the start, that only indicates to me that the defensive parties owe it to themselves and their society to engage in better self-criticism and reflection, and to shift gears until they find a path that really works.

I am precisely the sort of person you're talking about, Al -- the bookish person who loves the common people in the abstract but simply cannot relate to them in the flesh.  Unlike many of that sort of person, at least I know it. 

I tried doing door-to-door sales pitches for my college PIRG many, many moons ago -- and the only days I did well was when I dressed as much like a street hooker as my parents would allow (I still lived at home in those days), and if the man of the house answered the door.  (Sadly, the time when dressing like a street hooker would do me any good on the door-knocking circuit has long since passed.)  I've also tried cold-calling people on the phone to sell them things, and I can honestly say that I would much, much rather dig ditches. 

Because of this, I envy and respect the people who can do what Alinsky did (and what you do), and speak to the masses, knocking on doors knowing that if you get one person out of ten to listen to you you're doing good and steeling yourself to accept that the other nine persons will not be receptive.  It's easy to stay in online Amen Corners with like-minded folk and mutter about How Stupid Everyone Else Is even as you claim to feel for them; it's quite another to step out of these safe, ego-reinforcing shelters and actually work with the people you might be tempted to write off as "stupid".

Politics has to be about more than self indulgence. If it's not about winning, it's a big waste of everybody's time, labor and resources.

Exactly.  The people who whine that "you're not trying to effect change, you just want to 'win'" are looking for reasons to, y'know, avoid committing themselves to anything that might require more effort out of them than, say, a letter to the editor every three months.  At least I'm willing to admit that I'm a lazy coward.

When I first read Naomi Klein's piece I felt a combination of anger and disappointment. I devoured her book Shock Doctrine and consider it to be an important work, but it is incredibly frustrating to be constantly dismissed as some sort of gullible groupie by people who really have never taken the time to get to know those of us who have done the hard work of building the Obama movement and now organizing around our legislative agenda.

Ironically, the fiercest critics of American empire seem to want to replace one paternalistic system run by elites with another. But what do I know, I am just a silly, hapless "fan". Al you have my permission to share my contact information with Ms Klein, or the idiot Leonard Burman quoted in this hideous NYT piece http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/us/politics/19lobby.html?_r=1&hp

I would love for them to take a look at my calendar from the last three months--I haven't had time for hopelash or hopebreak or hopesickness. I've been too effing busy making phone calls, hosting phone banks, recruiting volunteers, knocking on doors, holding a press conference, raising funds, and calling and meeting with my elected officials--all while raising three children, holding down a job, and moving my mom into an assisted living. Oh and did I mention that the economic situation is so bad that my husband took a job in another state and is only able to get home about once a month. Fortunately my children are tremendous and we organize together. My 13 year old is probably the best phonecaller I have ever heard. He feels such a responsibility to the work that he studies the issues and reads the news voraciously so that he is prepared with facts and historical context in case someone has a question.

We worked hard for President Obama during his campaign and continue to do so now because he promised us that he would ask us to join him in the fight to reform our broken healthcare system, overhaul the banking system, restore fairness to the economy and our tax laws, and create a foreign policy based on respect and principle. He even warned us how hard it would be, that we would sometimes disagree and that he is imperfect. If Naomi Klein was so naive as to think that President Obama could wave a magic wand and resolve the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan, unravel the banking mess and 30 years of economic pillage instantly, or that single payer universal health care had a prayer of passing in Congress then she was the one bingeing on a kind of delusional hope and deserves the "hopeover" with which she now seems to be suffering. I just wish these armchair perfectionistic "progressives" would stop projecting that crap on me.

And just for fun let's look at the term "progressive movement". Both words describe a process--not some kind of magical arrival at a liberal utopia. We work hard, damned hard, to get what we can when we can and we keep striving for better. We keep moving and hopefully make progress.

Spot on post Al. The message from us older, whiter, "more educated" liberals should not be: "make sure your protests are organic and gluten free, and don't be overly happy about symbols & milestones of racial progress no matter how long you've yearned for them, that's not only so mlk sixtiesish, it just shows how shallow and unsophisticated you are."

My paycheck from working for a multinational corporation (as an old white male union member) should be an embarassment I guess according to Naomi Klein. Somehow it's not embarassment I feel when we (my local union brothers an I) are walking in the labor day parade together with the local livable wage, homless advocacy, peace and justice and refugee resettlement groups.

I've got a niece and a nephew in bi-racial marriages, my 3 kids have the travel bug from international school service trips. The personal connections and friendships are the most important things to them, but I can already tell the kinds of intercontinental cooperation and sharing that will spawn from these naturally occuring bonds will dwarf my decades of just "thinking" progressively.

It's about the facts right now.  There aren't enough in many areas to determine how this presidency is going.  The election represented a massive rejection of ignorance and the Bush plan for looting the nation.  It also represented, as you said, a multi racial movement that represented the best we could offer in 2008, which was quite good. 

There are two facts right now that are relevant.  The first is as you testify first hand:  "the Obama presidency has created much more space for people like us to get out there and do this hard work without the repression and marginalization that we have struggled under for decades."  That's a great change in process.  We're just beginning to understand the harassment that groups and individuals have experienced.

The second fact is that citizens are handing over the entire credit and good faith of the United States government, quite literally, to Wall Street failures who have stayed in place.  This is beyond disturbing, it's extremely bad policy and management practice.  When you have people who have failed in spectacular fashion and nearly ruined the economy in the process, you remove them.  The Secrtary of the Treasury and the president's chief economic advisor were both architechts of of the current disaster.  Their presence is disturbing, not because of who they are personally, but because they've continued the Paulson policies which favor the ultra rich and nobody else.

Ultimately, the outcome of the economic policies ongoing is the great determinant of whether or not Pres. Obama succeeds.  i"m quite sure that that applies equally across racial and cultural lines.

This is outstanding, although I'm sure that you've seen it:

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04032009/transcript1.html

I have seen that giving money to narco bankers is a bad idea. I have also as an arts advocate seen the absulte arrogance of the Obama Arts people sitting on the tiny pile of arts money availble.

My bus driver buddy came up with an interesting way of doing the arts  and we met with the elete distain for working people. I asked an old time guy from civil rights days and he liked the idea but the boys from Chicago got the lip lock on the arts.

People like the Pritzkers live in a bubble, they are well known for cheating artists and playing princeling with their tax write offs.

The Obama people are showing that the same old same old is true for the arts world. The corrupt grants system, the arts for the rich, by the rich puppys whelps, rules the empire. American Art ends at the border and is filtered by the same narco banksters who know nothing of "Flat time," plastic reality, or the architects of Argentina and Chile who were thrown out of helecopters for housing the poor.

Liked the Shock Doctrine but have not found a useful follow though. Something to put in the people's hands and use as tool for change. We need tools to by-pass traditional thinking about economy. She shows half the glass, the top half.

Bill Black's claims that Obama's administration is breaking the law by not nationalizing have been addressed here. 

There's this: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/4/7/716717/-Questions-for-William-Black

I hold no brief for Klein, that article is terrible, and her last book was equally bad.  I hope to god none of her facile neologisms make it into everyday speech.  They seem custom-designed to become eye-clawingly bad cliches spouted by braindead television anchors desperate for a new way to appear "balanced" in the face of total right-wing implosion.

I also completely agree that the extra-electoral (revolutionary) left in North America is basically an ineffectual homogenous sectarian sub-culture at this point.

However, there are some things in your piece I'd like to address and question:

First, I think you're giving short-shrift to the achievements of the direct-action wing of the Global Justice movement.  As short-lived as it was it played a key role in undermining the Washington Consensus.  David Graeber's excellent essay "The Shock of Victory" goes into the detail, but as a result of these movements the world was already distancing itself from "free trade" agreements, the IMF, World Bank, and WTO before the Iraq invasion further isolated the United States on the global stage.  That's no small potatoes.  It fell apart after 9/11, and it obviously didn't destroy capitalism, but it certainly took a lot of wind out of it,  and set the stage for later develpments, including the Obama movement.  For one thing, that movement morphed, partially, into the anti-war movement which, despite all its problems, did help set the stage for Obama to become an anti-war candidate.  None of that rhetoric would have entered the Presidential campaigns had it not been for the hard thankless work of people in the anti-war movement.

Further, one of the things that was exciting about the Global Justice movement, at least in North America, was that it was the first time in a long time that the privileged white-kid left and the working class had managed an alliance.  There were a lot of union folks at Seattle and Miami.

Now Obama is seeking to breathe new life into an IMF that this movement effectively destroyed.  So we'll see how that goes.

Second, although I think you're soft-pedaling the egregiousness of the bank bailouts, and omitting the Af/Pak situation, Obama's achievements thus far are laudable, and doubly impressive for occuring so quickly.  We do need to "demand" more, but we also should be thankful for victories.  Real people's real lives will be improved, or at least avoid total catastrophe, as a result of some of these policies.

What I worry about, and don't understand (as I'm not a participant in the Obama movement), is that for one I don't see the endgame to this sort of pure pragmatism you're outlining, and for another I think it may close off options that are actually more possible than people appear to believe, such as single-payer healthcare.  (I might be totally wrong about this, but given popular support for single-payer, if the Obama movement really got behind it and pushed it, I can't see how it could fail.  A reform like that alone would guarantee Dem party dominance well into the next decade and necessitate a complete reconfiguration of the Right.  If the moment is lost in passing half-measures that keep the insco's in the game, we would be waiting another generation for such a system.)

The way Obama bailed out the banks, and his rhetoric, makes it pretty clear that he's interested in restoring America, not transforming it.  I think the post-war period of prosperity appears to be what he has in mind, the so-called Golden Age of Capitalism, thus all the FDR comparisons.

But say it works as advertised.  Say that stability is restored to the economy, and the green programs lead to a period of growth.  Say it even happens well through the end of Obama's second term.  If there's no structural change, won't the capitalists just regroup and launch another counter-offensive like the one they started in the 70's and led us into the morass we're in today?  If we're not aiming for reforms that will also transform, how are we not just setting ourselves up for another round of pillage and plunder?  Don't we want to get beyond ping-ponging back and forth between hyper-exploitative capitalism and state-ameliorated exploitative capitalism?

So, I could certainly see that just getting America back to something resembling the period of post-war liberalism would be a huge move toward our mutually agreed upon anarcho-syndicalist dreamworld, but once that happens, then what?  How do we get there from here?  Or rather, how do we even get there from the here of ten years from now which will presumably be better if we all pitch-in and work for/with Obama?

The other thing I don't get, and would appreciate an explanation of, is the idea of the Obama movement now moving toward organizing on behalf of Obama's budget and other policy proposals.  Before the election, it was promised that the Obama movement would "hold his feet to the fire", but this seems to be off the table now, internet critiques notwithstanding.  Perhaps the "how" of that organizing will be decentralized and grass-roots, but the policies are still coming from above.  Wouldn't a Bolivian-style situation, in which not only were ground conditions changed by organizers, but policy itself was generated by the grass-roots, be a preferable alterative?

I respect the accomplishments, dedications, hard-work and diversity of the Obama movement.  Can you explain though why working for the budget is the best move for the movement right now?  Why does it appear to be sitting back and waiting for orders from above?  Is that a misperception?  If so, how?

Maybe America is just not quite there yet, and the grass-roots, even after coming off an historic victory, still needs to feel its power more before things get to the stage where state officials are taking orders from them, not the other way around.  But I imagine what makes it hard for the extra-electorals to get out there and pound pavement, is partly the idea that they're being asked to do it in service of policies generated from above.  "Get out there and get people behind the chief's plans!" is a hard row to hoe for a lot of folks, especially ones who are just not fond of chiefs for whatever reason.

Although maybe you don't really care about the craws of the extra-electorals.  It certainly seems like it, and honestly I can't see why you would.  In that case though, if they're so irrelevant, marginal and pointless, why waste such valuable vitriol and precious pixels on lambasting them?

Obama is just a Wall Street production. Look at his cabinet, every choice he's made are Wall Street lifers that are being put in strategic positions to move this nation towards global governance.

I'm not so sure you'll be so happy with him when this massive spending and huge influx of cash run us into hyperinflation. Its already begun with deflation (the dropping of prices due to poor sales). The banks are holding onto their cash waiting for the go ahead to flood the market and start the reverse.

Quote all the polls you want. Those that say they love him now probably don't see the facade he's created. He's really done nothing he's promised. He shut Guantanimo but keeps baghram in Afghanistan for renditioning. He's says he's pulling out of Iraq, but how can that be if he leaves 30 to 50,000 troops behind for "training". Its just another Korea. We should have 0 troops in Iraq. We went there on a lie, we can't stay there on the same lie. And speaking of whch, not prosecuting Bush for lying us into war is an "Obamanation". How can prosecute Clinton for lying about oral sex and Bush gets away with outing a CIA asset over his yellow cake lie.

Grab your guns guys and start canning your food, by 2012, you'll need it. Until we have truth in government and honest money. Nothing will change.

Peace all

Dan K

Scats - I love your questions - they're exactly the kind that I think about daily - and after I attend to some long scheduled matters today, I look forward to addressing them.

Dan K - I'll deal with yours, too, but mainly it will be to explain why I think a number of your main broad-brush assertions are factually suspect. You might ask yourself upon reading this, "but what's the difference between what scats just wrote and what I wrote?" That's easy: You start with errant presumptions and extrapolate from there, whereas scats starts with identifying potential problems that require investigation in order to be able to act effectively.

Meanwhile, while I run my errands, the floor is open for others to address them.

Obama's appointment of Arne Duncan and his market driven education "reforms" - or deforms as many of us are referring to them - have made educators who supported Obama take a good hard second look. The disaffection goes beyond Naomi Klein. There were lines around the block at one of her recent appearances in NYC and most of them were not college students. And many of us do organizing on a daily basis don't hurt your arm from patting yourself on the back.

Norm - I still want to get to Scats' more substantive comments above but I just gotta say about yours that in a single short paragraph you ape some of the very qualities of the "activist left" that I criticize in the essay.

1. You refer to a cabinet member and term his actions as "deforms" and yet you offer not an iota of explanation or fact to back up your claim. In baseball, that would be the first strike against your credibility.

2. You make a claim that Duncan's (unnamed) policies "have caused educators to "take a good hard second look." You offer no evidence of it, not even anecdotal. (And given that schoolteachers, in US cities, include a great many African-Americans and Hispanic-Americans, and the President's high favorability ratings among those demographics, which were documented in my essay, one would hope that someone trying to assert otherwise would offer perhaps a link or two or some other kind of documentation.) Strike two!

3. Somehow your defense of Ms. Klein is that her talks are popular and do not just draw college kids? Where in mother-effing-hell in my essay did I infer otherwise? Obviously, I'm addressing an influential colleague because she's influential (I don't pick on people smaller than me) and also because she's so wrong. You don't help her case - or yours - by using stale activist scripts (nor do you convince anyone when you say "many of us do organizing on a daily basis" yet what you're describing is "activism", not organizing. Strike three, you're out!

Here's a hint: If it doesn't involve knocking on doors or making phone calls and outreach to non-activists, that is, to everyday people, it is not organizing. Period. 

Scats - Finally! I can get to you now... You wrote:

"...as a result of these movements the world was already distancing itself from "free trade" agreements, the IMF, World Bank, and WTO before the Iraq invasion further isolated the United States on the global stage.  That's no small potatoes.  It fell apart after 9/11, and it obviously didn't destroy capitalism, but it certainly took a lot of wind out of it,  and set the stage for later develpments, including the Obama movement."

I comment: Fair enough, but let's be clear on the cart-horse thing: The Seattle protests were in late November-early December 1999, almost six years after the Zapatista rebellion in Mexico (which provided the language or poetry of a resistance to global capitalism), 15 months after the election of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela (advancing that language to relevance in an urban population) and Graeber and others are the first to acknowledge their primary contribution to creating the stage for Seattle '99.

I would posit that post-'99 the developed world activists that were most publicly associated with the Seattle demonstrations squandered their moment even before 9/11/2001. Seattle was truly beautiful: it had working class and union participation, particularly from the Teamsters, trucks and all. To watch Jill Freidberg's documentary about it, "This Is What Democracy Looks Like," it had the beginnings of a multi-racial bridge-building, too. And, certainly, Indymedia was one of the advances that came out of Seattle and proceeded to spread across the world.

The way that got squandered, in my opinion, is that the "leadership" (and yes I'm including those who insisted "there are no leaders" even as they wrote books and gave speeches about it) mainly tried to replicate what happened in Seattle at other summits of global men of power. That tactic required that vast sums of money be spent on air travel by globe-trotting activists who went from city to city, from World Social Forum to World Social Forum (I once did the math on how many tens of millions of dollars it cost for people to travel to one of them in Porto Alegre, Brazil; resources therefore not spent on local organizing). They squandered the moment by doing exactly what they were protesting against: they "went global" instead of emphasizing local organizing.

What we got out of that was, very quickly, a very homogenous demographic group of - I'll say it again - white, college educated protagonists. It did not take long for the working class and the potential rainbow coalition in the US and Europe to disperse and walk away from those efforts. Of course, many of them were received with open arms when they came - for weekend, maybe a month at most - down here to the "developing world." They spent money here and brought media attention. But they basically made a mess of things down here, too, on many occasions when they did come.

The slogan "globalize resistance" was cute but it basically created a mirror of colonialism in the movements in resistance to capitalism. It was a textbook "do as we say, not as we do" moment. If I had a devalued peso for every time I and others had to clean up the messes left by our paisanos when they did come to Latin America, we'd be very comfortable, at minimum, by now!

As for Obama "trying to breath new life into an IMF that was destroyed," well, it wasn't really destroyed, and I think the jury is still out as to whether he's merely resurrecting the bad formula or imposing a new formula on it. My tendency, watching the whole of what he's been up to, is to presume the latter. But I, too, keep a watchful eye on it all, waiting to see the deeds and not just the words.

As for the non-electoral US left "pounding the pavement," nobody, certainly not I, is suggesting that their only option for that is to pick up a clipboard from Organizing for America. You know, they could have done it for the Chicago Republic Windows and Doors workers when they occupied that factory. They could do it for immigration reform, or for a host of causes and issues to organize around. There are some very good union and other organizers out there that are not attached by the hip to Obama or his movement. They are worthy of all our respect and support. When we see it, we report it here at Narco News.

As for spending "valuable pixels" on such matters, well, it's not all or even most of what I do. But I think the length of your own very good comments and questions about it indicates that this is a necessary exercise, not "instead of" doing all the other work, but "in addition to" it.

best,

Al

I read her article, while I thought it was sadly funny, agree with the sentiment.  I didn't vote "for" Obama, I voted "against" McCain, and am very disappointed (but not surprised) in the Obama Administration, so far.

Leftists need to push back against President Obama for his establishmentarian policies as vigorously as they did against LBJ.

rmck2 - Well, I see that some sectors of "leftists" (thankfully, though, they do not speak for all) are still stuck in the utterly meaningless slogans of yester-decades gone by!

What the Eff does "Leftists need to push back against President Obama for his establishmentarian policies as vigorously as they did against LBJ" mean anyway?

Nothing to anybody born after 1968, and little to most born before it!

Also...

Waterflaws - Well, if you were never convinced enough to vote "for" someone to begin with, it's kind of hard to credibly argue that one is "very disappointed" later on. I find that attitude by certain sectors of the white academic left to be predictable and I'm "not surprised" by it either. But it doesn't reflect anything new: it's what you folks expected (and some perversely hoped) to happen all along...

I AGREE.  Although it's still hard for me to say that in public - I am a victim of Naomi Kleinism and the white leftist culture that influences the world of radical POC youth like me - argghhh to pervasive hegemony!  Thanks to this post, I now have the words to articulate my feelings.  This is going on my facebook.  Is it possible to blog about a blog about a blog?  I think so...

-B.

     I thought the play on Obummer, or is it Obomber, or whatever bowdlerization you choose was cute, but disurbing in its rush to judgement.  I confess to not finishing the article.  Criticism for the sake of criticism may ease Ms Klein's activist angst, it does nothing to point a way forward.  To pose the question, What shall we do? and attempt an answer to it.

  Consider the inherent momentum of Policy.  Consider the utter mess Obama has inherited.  It's like stopping a freight train.  Nine hundred thousand tons of steel can't stop on a dime.  A lot of issues can't be addressed and must be left to run the course laid out previously.  

   The fact that some of these issues are at least being addressed is remarkable.  I'm willing to cut Obama some slack.  He has offered an opening, but it is weeda peeple who must ACT.  Demand the impossible.  Demand the moon with a picket fence around it.  Take the best deal that shows up, consolidate the gain and go on.  Educate.  Agitate.  Organize. 

     I'm an old retired white guy, living on the pittance Social Security provides in a remote rural community.  The activist communuty is small enough that we facetiously call ourselves, the usual suspects.  I hound the elected reps incessantly about issues of concern, knowing that they pay attention to volume.  The squeaky wheel gets greased.  I do this despite feeling it may not in fact do anything. 

     On the labor front, the sit-ins, occupations and other actions are increasing in number and intesity.  The organizing efforts off the IWW Starbucks Workers Union, now in it's fifth year, has spread from one store in NYC through the world.  In Europe, the CNT-IWA in Spain and France have been organizing Starbucks in solidarity with the IWW.  An international day of protest saw pickets at Starbucks in, I believe, 30 countries in support of two fired baristas, one in Minneapolis-St Paul MN, and the other in Seville, Spain.  The first Starbucks Union, not affiliated with the IWW, in Latin Ameria has just been launched in Chile.  Go to: www.starbucksunion.org for more information.

     A Canadian union succeeded in organizing a WalMart.  The store was closed.  Undaunted, they organized a second store.  It, too, was closed.  The class war is heating up.  It's happening store by store by store.

     The striking thing is that these actions are taken by the workers themselves.  They might never have heard of direct action, but they are using it...and winning.  You're right.  It's time to push back. Hard.  

Hi

I'm unsure whether you will check back as this article is old now. I really liked the comment of scats and was pleased when you replied, because they are questions that I have too. I am young and want to get into leftist politics, organising, whatever name is appropriate. My inspiration to do this came from my mother who was a GP and essentially had her entire community ready to do whatever she said if she wanted - and she helped many people. but politics was her downfall and the games within it when all she wanted was to fix the system so it worked better for her patients. But also because I am new to the 'scene' have been trying to work out what is what and what has worked and what not. Im in the UK and still at uni but leaving soon and trying to work out what to do next.

I was interested though in scats question on the Obama movement, which I think you must have ran out of time to talk about. Yes, leftists who don't want to work with Obamas organisation can go out and work with other groups - some of my friends have been doing that will some of our occupied factories at the moment. But what about the organisation itself? Is it just that it better that people start somewhere and get the training. I suppose it is the question is it right to blindly follow the agenda exactly before you know exactly what you are pushing. Or do you believe in all that the Organisation is working for and it is safe? 

Thanks for your site,

celia

Thanks for your thoughtful and I believe, necessary questions concerning "Organizing for America", which is part of the DNC. I certainly had some of the same questions because I am an Indie voter. I received great training during the campaign and person to person contact so necessary in organizing. I have certain issues that are of importance to me, such as health care not attached to employment. Obama's agenda, after the Bush/Cheney hell mess, generally makes sense to me.

One other thing: I think that people interested in learning all they can about organizing and making real change, would benefit from the OFA training. People from all walks of life participate. This alone has taught me so much.  I continue to participate with OFA because I want to know what they are doing.  I still learn and I find that people are interested in how to participate in the change they want. 

A final thought: I have been reading "The Field" for over 2 years. I was involved with the Obama campaign for over 2 years. Al's (and others) analysis of the here and now in these crazy times give me information I need to move forward as an active citizen.

Thanks for your time, Celia. Keep coming back to The Field.