Spring in America is Just Around the Corner: Announcing 2009 Tour

Here.

I made the four hour trip to Chicago to participate in Al's "The Organizing of the President" and it was well worth it. I just secured my new place in Chicago this morning, and I'll be moving to the city in less than a month; I will definitely be adding my weight to the organizing efforts going on here (and I suppose I can officially join the Chicago Field Hands now).

This is exciting. Thanks, Al. If a book is a part of this in the future, independent bookstores are a great place, tho no honoraria that I know of, for organizing. I've got a favorite one in Washington DC!!!

Speaking of Washington, D.C. Good news, the organizers are organizing and being well received by new WH appointees.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/04/AR200812...

Welcome to Chicago!

At the LA Co Fieldhands page, I posted word of a follow up meeting that people who worked on the Obama for Pres/ Russ Warner for Congress in Pasadena are holding Tuesday eve, Dec 9, at a library in Pasadena. It's being run by an Obama Field Organizer/Camp Obama Alumna.

I'll bring word of this opportunity to that meeting, and we'll see what we can cook up!

Can someone at Berkeley or SFSU please kick-start this process:  would love to see Al in the Bay Area.

http://briefingroom.thehill.com/2008/12/05/caroline-kennedy-interested-in-clintons-seat/

I really hope she does this. She would be perfect as the new senator from New York. I really hope it happens.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2008/12/05/biden_picks_jared_berstein_as.html

Have any / many of you received the e:mail from Dem Nat'l Committee (David Plouffe) today?  Fits nicely with Al's post...

You can connect with fellow supporters, make progress on the issues you care about, and help shape the future of your community and our country.

Learn what you can do now to support President-elect Obama's agenda for change and continue to make a difference in your community.

Take the first important step by hosting or attending a Change is Coming house meeting. Sign up right now:

http://my.barackobama.com/changeiscoming

I am hoping to attend or host one of these meetings.  Once we start getting ourselves focused, would love to recruit you to come back home to Mamaroneck, Al, and talk to us.   I will write to you with ideas when the time is right.

Wonderful idea. The "change is coming" meetings will no doubt be excelent opertunities to listen to the community and
start grassroots organizing in local areas.

Al wrote: People are "fired up and ready to go" to do something other than sit back as spectators waiting for a tail called Washington to wag the dog for us. The dream is to set democracy back to its proper chain of command: from the bottom, up.

I have zero doubt, for example, that if and when these community organizing efforts in Madison and Chicago reach the critical mass to be able to mobilize entire neighborhoods to block a home foreclosure - through nonviolent civil disobedience if need be - it will force Washington's hand and provoke policy to reflect the will of the people.

As far as I can tell, "Washington" includes (though of course is not limited to) President Barack Obama, starting Jan 20, 2009.

And then, Lisa Ballard wrote: Have any / many of you received the e:mail from Dem Nat'l Committee (David Plouffe) today?  Fits nicely with Al's post...

"You can connect with fellow supporters, make progress on the issues you care about, and help shape the future of your community and our country.

Learn what you can do now to support President-elect Obama's agenda for change and continue to make a difference in your community.

Take the first important step by hosting or attending a Change is Coming house meeting. Sign up right now:

http://my.barackobama.com/changeiscoming"

I am hoping to attend or host one of these meetings.  Once we start getting ourselves focused, would love to recruit you to come back home to Mamaroneck, Al, and talk to us.   I will write to you with ideas when the time is right.

My reflections:

How much does anyone want to bet that none of these Change is Coming efforts will choose approaches focused on -- or at least substantially including -- holding the new president accountable?

That's the invisible part that's left out of the narrative.  Or one of them. In the story, Barack Obama is the door-opener of change.

Also. If people were to choose to organize to hold someone in power accountable, it is generally unwise to send them or their agents the initial raw information about what you are talking about and planning.

Something in this overall set-up sort of reminds me of an experience some years ago when I was still teaching. It was a "community organization" class. I made a decision that the students challenged, so we had this long difficult class discussion about it. And at one point they asked me "can we just decide to resist your decision?" I laughed (I couldn't help it) and told them that if they were going to do any sort of organized resistance, they probably should not start by asking the permission of the person in power.

Not the same thing, but still this reminds me of it somehow. One similarity is in the roles that people in power play, and how they can appear to be one thing while actually functionally being another.

So. As a teacher, I was relatively accessible and open to critique. At the same time, this particular decision (which if my memory serves me correctly, was to have students identify and set their own learning goals for grading purposes, or actively/affirmatively choose the ones I had initially set for them, and some of them did not like that new requirement of choice and work at all). Anyway, this particular decision was something I had done a lot of thinking about and was pretty rock solid on.

Meaning: I was not going to change my mind on it. So there we were, me having the structural power to set requirements for their work in the class ... giving them a decision that would directly affect them that they felt was not okay. So what did we do? We had a discussion about it. I hadn't planned on it going as it did, and it was really draining for me, actually, but we had a pretty heated discussion about it. In the end, I did not move.

Though I didn't realize it at the time, my overall open-ness and willingness to listen and have this be an open communication while at the same time being so solid about my decision was in some ways functionally deceptive. I appeared accessible because I was listening and engaging, but my mind had already been made up.

Functionally, I had the power. Inside the classroom context, I was not accountable to the students. (I suppose they could have gone over my head, and it might possibly have worked since I was an adjunct, but it was a state school and the students didn't really have much power even so).

I think my functionally deceptive open-ness and willingness to engage on this was a huge part of the context for why it seemed natural to them to ask me, the one with the power, if they could organize to resist my decision. It was like, my friendliness and apparent overall concern with their well-being made it appear as if I had less power than I did, or something like that. I wish I could put my finger on it more precisely.

Again, this is not the same as anything with the Change is Coming parties, but I feel some overarching resonance nonetheless. *sigh* I really wish I could be more precise, though.

Michelle - You write:

"If people were to choose to organize to hold someone in power accountable, it is generally unwise to send them or their agents the initial raw information about what you are talking about and planning."

Not necessarily, in my view. Gandhi, for example, always telegraphed his plans in advance. He told power what he and his people would do each step along the way. ML King - a follower of that path - did the same.

Of course both had cards up their sleeves and the timing of announcing the next steps was always subject to tactical advantage, but in this age of total surveillance I think it's almost impossible not to have a "secret" found out, so the Gandhian techniques probably are even more utile now.

As for the Change house parties, sure, I absolutely agree that there is a cooptation process at work here. But I don't see it as exclusive or excluding to autonomous work - such as the anti-foreclosure project - on things those officially sponsored meetings are not likely to touch.

On the other hand, for us organizers with one foot on the outside, such meetings can serve us, too: as places to infiltrate and recruit for the outside projects, too. (And frankly, a lot of the folks on the "inside" will be lovin' that and winking as they pass us the email sign-in list.) And I think that Obama's supporters will be deployed by his organization to do some good things too. Again, not at all in conflict with the just as necessary independent efforts to push and pull that administration from below.

I don't see an inherent problem with loving the guy but also realizing that love, in this case, is a battlefield and a power struggle: two forces each pushing to have it their way, and each will compromise on some things but not on others. And the latter situation will make things interesting anyway.

Michelle, I thought your perspective was interesting.  Hadn't thought about some of the points you raised.

One of the questions you asked is whether these groups that are forming will serve purpose of holding the president accountable.  I am already involved with a number of groups that have been trying to hold our leaders accountable on a number of fronts --  i.e. Common Cause, True Majority, Working Assets/Credo, International Rescue Committee and Codepink who sent out the following alert today...

When America voted for Barack Obama, America voted for change. As we watch the President Elect pull together his cabinet, full of members of the Clinton and Bush administrations, we want to remind him of the promises he's made to the American people. We want to remind him to keep the door open to voices that belong to the future, not just the past--to listen to the people who were right about the war in Iraq, right about the bail out, right about the many tragic failures of the Bush years.

Etc.

I live in a very dense suburban NYC area. One where it takes a real effort to overcome the superficial and impersonal surface to sort through and find people who potentially share interests and values.  One of the unanticipated outcomes of the grassroots efforts on behalf of Obama in our area was that it brought me together with many like minded people of all different ages, races, genders, etc...  in my community whom I may never have connected with in the course of an average week, day, month.  What was even more rewarding is that as we came together to work on the campaign we often immediately launched into much deeper conversations about core values, state of the world, personal responsibility, and other efforts we were involved with, developing some valuable new friendships / partnerships.

I think that what the house parties offer someone like me is to continue to meet and connect with people who may share some core values and hopefully an interest in and commitment to effecting change.  It offers us a forum to have structured discussions on issues that matter to our communities and our world.   Whether we will be successful is certainly yet to be seen.  Not sure who I will be meeting, how the agenda will go, whether we will "gel" at all. 

But, believe me, I am not planning on simply being a mouthpiece for government propaganda if that's what you were getting at?

I have been reading your previous posts with empathy.  I am feeling some of the same skepticism that you have expressed.  But,  I do think the benefit of the Obama network in a densely populated area like greater NYC is that it can connect us at the grassroots level.  We then need to take it from there and make it work for us.  Not a new concept, but perhaps new inspiration where there was previously apathy, skepticism and hopelessness.  We shall see.  As you have said, it is probably wise to keep guard up. But, need to take some risks as well -- at least for a while.

Hey Lisa, you wrote: But, believe me, I am not planning on simply being a mouthpiece for government propaganda if that's what you were getting at?

No, that's not what I am getting at. My concern is that there are some very sophisticated illusions being woven from the top down here. I'm doing offline analysis of that, in two strands -- the emotional narrative itself is one, and the structure and reality versus the illusions (narrative) is another.

I am offended and sickened by the illusions woven in all of this. It's just my nature to be offended by such things.

As I wrote offline today:

A narrative-sourced "collective identity" is not an actual collective. The entity Obama is part of -- and now a leader in -- cannot be a true collective because its own foundations (from the land theft to its cultural system to its means of survival) are themselves false.

and, after much other stuff:

I think what currently nauseates me and disorients me about what Obama is doing is not that he is/will be in this role of extreme structural power [president].  I would rather have him in that role than anyone else who has been able to approach it.

No, the objection I have is to the illusion of the narrative as it relates to the structural reality. For example: calling on people to let go of our barriers, to trust and open up and "hope" in a system that by its deepest nature feeds relentlessly on our souls and breaks our spirits for the purpose of its own survival.

I recognize that my experience and perception of what we are inside is in very stark contradiction to the vision offered by President-elect Obama. I recognize that his narrative promoting his far more benevolent vision may actually be necessary in certain functional ways given the limitations of what is actually possible here. I recognize that it may be the best that this entity and those inside it can do, collectively. And if so, it would be unwise for me to call on it to not exist or to not function. So I won't do that.

Still .... I have my own experience and perception. To me, narrative-creation is like building the roof of a building first, in the air. Ungrounded. How does it even stay up? What laws of truth can it possibly be accountable to? It's sickening and disorienting to me.

But communicating and acting through narrative-creation is normal and typical in this cultural context. It freaks me out, but I recognize that it is normal and typical in this cultural context.

So anyway, Lisa, I am glad for whatever is good in this for you, for those you are working with, and for others finding value in this whole thing. I don't think you will be a mouthpiece for the government. My concerns aren't in that realm, actually.

And I've been really fumbling to try to articulate the source of my unease and feeling of wrongness. I've used language and concepts that aren't quite right. I've written in contexts like this one, where I have been able to learn but where I diverge from the goals and maybe even the underlying ethos.

I've been wracking my brain on this one. If foreclosures are stopped, what happens next? Given the number of potential foreclosures, the consequences are going to be multiplied a million-fold, so I figure if I were to support this plan it would be good to try to consider the alternative outcomes of the two scenario's under consideration.

First scenario: the foreclosures go forward, unamended

This is a financial disaster that will crush the economies of almost all our major cities. Detroit will simply be considered to be ahead of its time. This is a result to be avoided.

Second scenario: all foreclosures are stopped

This would depend on what happened after the initial foreclosures are stopped. If the banks were forced to accept their write-downs on the values of homes and, in effect, sell the foreclosed homes to the residents, this would demolish home values in a very, very short time (weeks?) The reason for this would be that everyone else's homes would be reset to the foreclosed amount. For those that can't afford the foreclosed mortgage, the house goes on the market for the foreclosed price. This choice's end result would be an economic hit, but likely not on the scale of the first scenario. Still, it would be best to avoid this.

However, if the banks were forced to rewrite the mortgages against the true value of the homes, the success of this activity would depend on the accuracy of the valuation. If the valuation were too high, the situation wouldn't change and we'd have scenario one. If the valuation is too low, the situation would be similiar to scenario two. If they get it right within the buyer's margin of error (probably around ten percent, but I'll wait for the economist guys to school me) we'll still take the hit we're due (a whole lot of money went out the door for nothing) but the least number of people would wind up homeless. Ideally, there could be a partnership between the banks and a lessor's association that could make sure people don't wind up homeless. (Now THAT seems to be an ideal goal for this community organizing...) Also the market and by proxy the economy as a whole spends the least amount of time in the tank.

Still....I can't help but think that the odds of getting the re-evaluations right are slim. If anything, community organizers should be arguing for more realistic pricing on houses - contra the NAR. Any artificial propping up of prices will only stagnate the world economy longer.

@Michelle

To me, narrative-creation is like building the roof of a building first, in the air. Ungrounded. How does it even stay up? What laws of truth can it possibly be accountable to? It's sickening and disorienting to me.

Not sure I'm quite following your concerns about narrative creation, but perhaps I'm confusing "narative creation" with what right wing idealogues call "framing the issue".  It seems to me for 30 years we've seen the right build a powerful foundationless roof based on distortion or "framing".  "Anti abortion" or Anti-Choice" becomes "pro-life" by the same warmongers that gleefully support capitol punishment and get wet dreams contemplating the Book of Revelations Rapture when "rivers flow with blood".  Deliberate GOP vote suppression is framed as the Help America Vote Act.  

And right now we are seeing the right try to downplay Obama's election by calling the U.S. a "center right" nation, which it has not been on issue after issue - such as specific polls on health care or the right to join a union - for half a century. 

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I appear to have offended you and others.  I apologize for my snarkiness, and I'll continue my conversation with you offline.