The Tea Party is on a roll with its upset Senate primary victory in Delaware. If the rest of us don't start raising hell, the Tea Party will have us living it.
Are you mad as hell but don't want to join the Tea Party? Do you still want to get the change you voted for in 2008? That's most Americans, but the right wing is the only wing talking about its anger.
Public outrage is the most powerful force in the world if you know how to leverage it and turn it into power. That's why I wrote The Progressive's Guide To Raising Hell, published today by Chelsea Green, to show average Americans how their common anger can be turned into power using the force of public opinion online and offline.
Award-winning filmmaker Robert Greenwald made this short video about Raising Hell and its battle-proven, step-by-step tactics that artfully sums up the book's essence.
I have spent two decades fighting and winning campaigns against insurance companies, Big Oil, utilities, banks, and corrupt politicians. The tactics of turning anger into change are the same regardless of whether you are trying to win a Senate primary, pass a ballot measure or get an insurer to pay a claim.
Change is no simple matter in America politics, as Americans have recently learned so well.
Elections rarely produce the change they promise because too often ballot victories leave intact the ways power is exercised, and on whose behalf. The special interests that fund and curry favor with our legislators may rebalance their party allegiances, but not their self-interest.
Anger, not hope, is the fuel of political and economic change. As things grow worse and worse, public rage grows more intense--and so does the energy for making things better. And in 2010 in America, anger rules, but it needs to be vectored and focused if it is to succeed in fueling the type of change that the majority of Americans believe in.
If progressives walk away, rather than engage, the Tea Party and GOP will capture the popular anger and turn it against government, rather than focus it rightly back on the targets of the 2008 election: Wall Street, health insurers, polluters, the military industrial complex, and the politicians they buy. If we want progress, the kind that polls show 60 percent of Americans believe in, we need to do more than vote every two to four years or wait for Obama to learn the tactics of confrontation.
We need to make demands. We need to raise some hell. The alternative is giving up the reins of government to a flash mob that wants to do nothing but destroy it.
_______________________
Jamie Court is author of The Progressive's Guide To Raising Hell: How To Win Grassroots Campaigns, Pass Ballot Box Laws And Get The Change You Voted For (Chelsea Green) and President of Consumer Watchdog.
Follow Jamie Court on Twitter: www.twitter.com/RaisingHellNow
Does author actually believe the Tea Party helps the Right?
Does he believe that WTO protestors help the environmental movement?
Does he believe the Weathermen helped the antiwar movement during Vietnam?
WRONG!
We in the non-fringe majority see hooligans and vandals and think "If they're for it, I'm against it".
Only the fringe themselves are emboldened by it, the rest react in horror.
The Tea Party just cost Repubs a Senate seat. You want Progressives to act the same?
Please DO join the Tea Party, it will help the Progressive movement.
That is just too funny! Most of those targets of 2008 you mention have been greatly rewarded by the Democrats that took control.
Great job!
I believe him!
This old activist has rarely missed an election in 40 years and I 'Ain't Done Yet!' I supported President Obama in '08, I support him now and I'll have his back in '12!
http://seattlefeministinpoverty.blogspot.com/
The wealthy are already making record profits and hoarding that money or investing it off shore.
Not what I've been dreaming about
Don't you want something more?
Get mad, America. Please get mad.
We ARE mad. Haven't you noticed? We're so mad we're teabagging our way thru every RINO and Democrat we can find.
http://www.theodore-roosevelt.com/images/research/speeches/trnationalismspeech.pdf
THE NEW NATIONALISM
Osawatomie, Kansas
August 31, 1910.
"...There can be no effective control of corporations while their political activity remains. To put an end to it will be neither a short nor an easy task, but it can be done.
We must have complete and effective publicity of corporate affairs, so that people may know beyond peradventure whether the corporations obey the law and whether their management entitles them to the confidence of the public. It is necessary that laws should be passed to prohibit the use of corporate funds directly or indirectly for political purposes; it is still more necessary that such laws should be thoroughly enforced. Corporate expenditures for political purposes, and especially such expenditures by public-service corporations, have supplied one of the principal sources of corruption in our political affairs.
It has become entirely clear that we must have government supervision of the capitalization, not only of public-service corporations, including, particularly, railways, but of all corporations doing an interstate business..."
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/08/31-2
The August Day Plutocracy Would Love Us to Forget | CommonDreams.org
"The August Day Plutocracy Would Love Us to Forget
Today marks the 100th anniversary of the most ‘radical speech’ an American ex-President has ever delivered.
I was a democrat, but now I'm an independent. I got more sense than to vote for the rethugs or tea crackpots in order to assuage my anger with some of the dems.
And what's with all this excitement crap. I don't have to be excited to vote. I need to be engaged in the politics that affect me. Kinda like I am not excited to go to work everyday, but I go. I get excited when I get the check. Sitting home from a job or an election gets you nothing.
http://seattlefeministinpoverty.blogspot.com/
Agreed.
Thinking back to last summer, during the health care "debate," we were only a few months into Obama's presidency when hordes of "progressives" began screaming that they wouldn't vote for Obama or Democrats in the future... this, in spite of the fact that progressives weren't out voicing their will in public and thus allowed the tea party loons to take over the debate. I suspected then that these were individuals with ulteriour motives who simply ran out to stir the pot of discontent... in favor of Republicans.
Independents and moderate Republicans probably realize as well that tea party nation would be the push that sends the country free-falling off the cliff once and for all... those who are politically engaged, anyway.
The task at hand is to educate those who aren't necessarily into politics... because, as I've learned, not many of them realize that the GOP tea party is campaigning on dismantling Social Security and Medicare. It's time to let the cat of the bag in seriously noisy way.
LOL.
Such as the very specific Plan at http://www.fairamerica.us .
This cannot go on. Goldman Sachs is not the kind of company you want to run a nation of any kind. Loving America is required to do this job, president. And if not, it will leave America a huge farm for other countries, with the dollar worth a penny. So, it's a matter of urgency, in my opinion, which I realize differs from many. Tax hikes, no jobs, fallen dollar.
Then I suggest you lock yourself in the basement, grab your ankles, situate your head between your legs, and kiss your @$$ goodbye.
Those of us with the will to live will continue to fight back, but thanks so much for the defeatist attitude.