Though I share people's sadness for our country, I'm not depressed about the election results. I'm not any more disappointed in President Obama than I've been since he chose his advisers two years ago. I'm not even mad at the Tea Party. I'm fact, I am kind of psyched and ready do the work that needs to be done.
Change was never going to originate in Washington, D.C. Change is always catalyzed by social movements. The legitimate anger that animates the Tea Partiers may be misplaced and polluted with racism and fear, but most of us share their outrage at the system we find ourselves participants in and victimized by. If anyone is to blame for the Tea Party, it is the Beltway Democratic Party affiliated progressive organizations and foundations who failed to create and fund a populist left flank.
The strategic response to Tuesday's election results is not to fight to defend private mandates or toothless financial reforms. The strategic response is to refocus and redouble our efforts to build a nationally-networked, community-based progressive populist movement that makes a real difference in the people's lives.
After the polls closed, Backbone Campaign and the Coffee Party announced a summit for strategic dialogue and action on January 21, 2011, the first anniversary of the Citizens United vs. F.E.C. Supreme Court decision. Together, we must build a movement capable of wining the long-term prize of a Constitutional amendment that strips corporations of their illegitimate claim to the inalienable rights of humans, and topples the corrosive equation of money with speech.
With affection and respect for our creative friends at agit-pop, the issue is not RepubliCorp. Wall Street's money is polluting Democratic coffers and its people are embedded in the current administration. What unites progressives, most Americans, and some in the Tea Party is a gut instinct that the real enemy is the corruption of our system by the top 0.1 percent to whom wealth and power flow, and for whom wars are waged against countries and classes. Maybe Oligarchy Inc. or Empire Unlimited are more accurate, evenhanded labels. Regardless, reversing the direction that power and money/equity flows requires a real movement with a national and local strategy to build economic and political power.
Many who've landed new jobs in D.C. will likely be revealed to be defenders of Wall Street or Oligarchy Inc. rather than Main Street. Progressives should seize this as an opportunity to lock arms with principled, reality-based conservatives on the big issues we agree on. For instance, we should make "Too big to fail" synonymous with "Too big to exist!" We should unite behind challenging the Federal Reserve's unaccountable and incestuous relationship with Wall Street banks. When the Federal Reserve provides TRILLIONS of dollars in 0 percent loans to mega-banks, so they can buy US Treasury Bonds, it's taxpayers who pay the interest on those bonds. When the Fed "weak dollar theory" cash machine kicks into gear it's everyone's home equity, wages, and pensions that are devalued in order to prop up and fuel the Wall Street casino economy.
There is also some potential for a right-left coalition to dismantle empire and challenge the military-industrial-congressional-complex. Budgetary accountability is a universal value. Deficits are infinitely more impacted by wars and occupations than Social Security (which in fact adds not one penny to the deficit). And localization ideas such as community-based financial institutions and local systems of exchange also transcend ideological divides.
But ultimately, none of the national goals can be achieved unless built on the foundation of local community-based organizing. And that will take more than one election cycle. What we really need is a 20+ year strategy to divest from Wall Street and build equity -- economic, social, and environmental -- in our communities. Together, a progressive populist movement with its allies can build a movement that offers what the Tea Party never will, i.e. SOLUTIONS!
Here are some local & national populist organizing ideas that really excite me:
Organizing Community Credit Unions (learn about what we are doing in our community), Community Solar Projects, Community Supported Organizer (CSO) positions, establishing Coal Free Zone to grow green weatherization jobs, Local Currencies, local Transition Town projects, Foreclosure Defense efforts, Mortgage Strikes, Land Trust Housing, Associations for the Unemployed, Depositors Unions, Farm-to-School Programs, Agricultural Coops, Human Rights Zones is low-wage worker areas, and Clean Elections campaigns. Here's a recent publication from the Alliance for Democracy with other great ideas.
How is Backbone Campaign going to contribute to building this movement?
The Backbone Campaign is already working on many of the above ideas or supporting allies who are leading the way. The Credit Union is of particular value to organizers, as we have discovered a model that others could easily emulate. (Story here.) Our Coal Free Zone project is up and going, and hopefully our Community Solar project will evolve into model others can emulate as well.
Our 2011 Artful Activism trainings will deliver strategic tools to community activists that transcend spectacle for spectacle sake. We will prioritize collaboration with organizations that combine a global and national critique with local organizing. This year we will augment our Artful Activism trainings with best practices from old fashion community organizing. For example, in LA we are collaborating with foreclosure defense and peace groups to produce a local training that combines creative tactics with door-to-door organizing. Our summer Localize This! Action Camp will be expanded to include a Community Supported Organizer training. And we are working with the Coffee Party to design a CSO template, to help create positions in communities around the country.
January 20-22, 2010 events to mark the Citizens United anniversary have the potential to be a powerful pivot point. Backbone's collaboration with the Coffee Party, MovetoAmend, the Transpartisan Alliance, PDA and hopefully many others is an exciting expansion of our reach and a broad acknowledgment that Beltway-Centric, mouse-click activism is not paying off and people are ready looking for more effective engagement.
If you'd like to take part in the January 20-22 effort, please contact the Backbone Campaign.
![Songs Are Free: Bernice Johnson Reagon with Bill Moyers [VHS]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/213018GP9EL._SL160_.jpg)
Best statement in the article: "If anyone is to blame for the Tea Party, it is the Beltway Democratic Party affiliated progressive organizations and foundations who failed to create and fund a populist left flank."
Worst: "Backbone's collaboration with...PDA..."
Sorry, but they are a good example (and just one example of many) of a stealth Beltway Democratic Party org. And that's just what we're going to have to look out for in this movement. As soon as any progressive org gets traction, out come the stealth-Dems. From there on its their way or the highway as they bully their way up the leadership and essentially make the organization into a submissive Beltway Democrat sycophant. We can't let this happen to Backbone or the Coffee Party.
Watch your back Bill.
American "conservatism" is founded upon the principle of denying reality.
Liberal Democrats and those further left are now (virtually) officially political castaways. Not since the 1972 Democratic National Convention have left-liberals had any meaningful role in the councils of our party, much less in governments formed by neoliberal Dem presidents who staged a hostile takeover of the party following Nixon's resignation and the fall of Saigon. These events (and their aftermath) vindicated McGovern (and neo-isolationist "McGovernism"). Yet liberalism was thereafter (senselessly) marginalized.
In recent decades neoliberal Dems co-authored with conservative Republicans deregulation, free trade and world (military) policing policies that produced the Great Recession, placed Americans into wage competition with poor but capable workers throughout the developing world and irrationally transformed what should have been a peaceable post-Cold War world into the New World Disorder.
Last Tuesday the electorate voted "no confidence" in Dem politicians as potential guardians of the public good against the nihilistic forces of plutonomy, greed and imperialism. Rightly so. Because neoliberal Dems generally agree with (and certainly don't despise) cowboy capitalism and conservative values, they never attack them at the root as opposed to (tepidly) at the branch.
Those assembled January 20-22 should found a new big tent principled progressive party (modeled roughly on the British Liberal Democrats) and invite “the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party” and any interested third party members to join us.
Eric C. Jacobson
Public Interest Lawyer
Culver City, California
http://www.libdems.us
I wonder if it should be called the Equity Party.
Eight states are expected to gain House seats, if 2009 Census Bureau estimates hold: Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, South Carolina, Texas, Utah and Washington. After last week's elections, Republicans hold the edge in those states, 44 to 24.
Nine states are expected to lose seats: Illinois, Iowa, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Democrats have the edge in those states, 45 to 28.
That adds up to 17 states gaining or losing seats, and Democrats have unified control — the governor and both houses of the legislature — of only two of them: Massachusetts, which has no Republican members of Congress, and Illinois.
Republicans wield the redistricting pen in Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas and Utah. In other states, control is divided or independent commissions draw the boundaries.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/2010-11-09-redistricting09_ST_N.htm
Last week's elections also bring more than 60 new Republican House members to Washington from competitive districts — including at least 22 in states expected to lose seats in Congress before the next elections.
"It's an embarrassment of riches for Republicans," said Michael McDonald, a political scientist at George Mason University. "They won almost every race they could win. Now there's going to be the tension within the party between those who want to protect their seats and those who want to expand the majority."
Bill Moyer puts forth some good points. If we, as Americans, want our Country to change, it is up to us, on the ground floor. I may disagree with him on some very important issues, but at least I am willing to read what he writes, and to actually ponder his positions. We may even find MORE common ground. This constant bickering and labeling has to stop. What has it really gotten us? The Sterwart/Colbert rally was a great idea, but it seems no one really listened to the core message.
The Tea Party did one thing very well. It showed all Americans what is possible, if people just speak up, en masse. Agree with the TP or not, it proved to all, we CAN make a difference.
Textynn stated below, the disappointment so many have. I would actually support Dennis Kucinich, not because I agree with his ideals, but because he actually has a spine. Ron Paul is a similar politician. Just because we disagree, doesn't mean we can't at least try to have the conversation.
Let's start by Auditing the Fed and go from there.
fyi - I attempted to put together a debate on inalienable rights and the Constitution with Paul and Kucinich... but party politics got in the way.
It's the 'the other side of the aisle' thing that assumes we all fit withing the binary logic of a universe with two (corporate) parties. The so-called "middle" that folks like John Avalon like to talk about is a kind of apathetic wonder bread - nowhere land - that in any other country would be considered pathetic sheep. Relative to the rest of the world, we don't actually have a true left or labor party in this country. There is no party gutsy enough to actually defend the interests of the common person, or meaningfully critique the status quo.
Ross Perot, Dennis Kucinich, Ron Paul, Alan Grayson, Paul Wellstone, Bernie Sanders, Cynthia McKinney, Jesse Jackson Jr. though usually marginalized - all demonstrate an earnest attempt to address some piece of the problem. Finding the overlap with the Ron Paul folks on the biggest issues of empire, monetary policy, and individual liberty (challenging the Homeland Security Industrial complex) would free up a great deal of time and resources. Perhaps so much so that the economy and rhetoric of scarcity would be irrelevant.
It was the promise of real health care reform that filled the coffers of Dem candidates. It was the belief that people in health jeopardy would be saved from being the cash cow of heartless and psychotic billionaires that systematically dump us when we've spent everything.
The country and the base was right there behind our President and the Dems with pitchforks in hand. What did we get for our efforts? We got ignored, we got arrested, we got Pelosi being duplicitous, we got a bill that gave more power to the health care monopoly that had been victimizing us to more than a criminal degree for years. We got to watch as Max Baucus openly flaunted his very lucrative relationship with the for profit system . We watched as he actually thanked Wellpoint for writing a bill that entrenched their power and left us powerless ...again.
Moyers also referred to what historian Clinton Rossiter called the period of "the great train robbery of American intellectual history," when "conservatives—or better, pro-corporate apologists" began using terms such as "progress", "opportunity", and "individualism" in order to make "the plunder of America sound like divine right." He added that Charles Darwin's theory of evolution was also used by conservative politicians, judges, and publicists to justify the idea of a "natural order of things" as well as "the notion that progress resulted from the elimination of the weak and the 'survival of the fittest.''
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Moyers
As the Republicans control the House and the President is at best a weak leader, there is no progressive legislation that will pass over the next two years federally
There are however several states where the Democrats still control the governorship and legislature. A movement could try getting progressive reforms through California, Washington, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, Maryland and Illinois, which could then be used as models should Democrats ever having a working majority and a President who isn't weak conciliator again.
Nancy Pelosi is offender number one. If she becomes leader of the minority party I will be complete disgusted with Dems and done with them. Her approval of the Bush WH with her impeachment is off the table crap without even lingering for a little threat was proof positive that she is in the pocket of the elite and no true Dem.
We need the Progressive Party and we need it now.