webodec3ARCHIVEPreview
Open in TheBrain

social movement

belated?

inevitable call after pol defeat

===

REF

The '3.5% rule': How a small minority can change the world | Harvard Kennedy School

Authors:

David Robson

Description

Research featuring Carr Center's Erica Chenoweth.*

Nonviolent protests are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts – and those engaging a threshold of 3.5% of the population have never failed to bring about change.*

"In 1986, millions of Filipinos took to the streets of Manila in peaceful protest and prayer in the People Power movement. The Marcos regime folded on the fourth day.

In 2003, the people of Georgia ousted Eduard Shevardnadze through the bloodless Rose Revolution, in which protestors stormed the parliament building holding the flowers in their hands."

Citations

David Robson. 5/13/2019. “The '3.5% rule': How a small minority can change the world.” BBC Future.

---

MTA SERIES

Cultural Change for the We the People Amendment - Move to Amend

The series is as follows

---

AN 6 25

Last week, I mentioned conservative columnist David Brooks’s call for a “comprehensive national civic uprising” against Trump, which Brooks described as “one coordinated mass movement.”

I wondered what shape that mass movement could take and asked whether, for example, it might be a general strike.

One person who got back to me was my old friend Sam Brown.

Sam knows something about mass movements. He was one of the chief organizers of the Moratorium to End the Vietnam War, on October 15, 1969.

When Richard Nixon took office on January 20, 1969, about 34,000 Americans had already been killed fighting in Vietnam — and an untold number of Vietnamese. During Nixon’s first year in office, from January 1969 to January 1970, roughly 10,000 additional Americans were killed there.

IFrame Content

IFrame Content

IFrame Content

Sam reminds me that the idea for the moratorium started out as a call for a general strike. Sam (who previously had worked on Eugene McCarthy’s 1968 presidential campaign) changed the concept from general strike to a “moratorium.”

The moratorium was a huge success. Millions participated throughout the world. (Bill Clinton and I, then graduate students at Oxford, joined in the demonstration in London — which later became an issue when Clinton ran for president.)

The moratorium was followed a month later, on November 15, 1969, by a large Moratorium March in Washington, D.C.

It was the first time the anti-Vietnam War movement reached the level of a full-fledged mass movement. Many credit it with hastening the end of that horrendous war. (Interestingly, research shows that nonviolent protests “have never failed to bring about change” when they involve at least 3.5 percent of the public.)

Why did Sam change it from a general strike to a moratorium? He says he wanted protests to take place in communities rather than on university campuses so that “the heartland folks felt it belonged to them.”

Sam also thought that the best way to pressure Nixon was to ensure the movement had a “respectable” face in order to win the support of the largest number of Americans, many of whom did not much like either the hippie counterculture or the New Left movement. At the time, Nixon’s opponents were easily dismissed as “nattering nabobs of negativism,” or, in Trump-speak, as “whiners and losers.”

Sam’s view is that those of us who oppose Trump will similarly be dismissed until clearly identifiable Trump voters join with us. And, as then, the people who agree with us but don’t express themselves or participate need an easy on-ramp to do so.

In Sam’s view, “strike” has an overtone of militancy, which isn’t an easy place for people in the middle to go. Furthermore, “strike” doesn’t resonate with a small business person or a farmer or most of rural America. (Sam’s favorite visual for the demonstration would be Lincoln and Des Moines immobilized by tractor-driving farmers.)

Sam thinks we need an action that can grow and morph with time into a national movement — and one with which people newly opposed to Trump can identify.

So what’s the best word to describe this? Sam doesn’t think “moratorium” is right this time around, but we still need a neutral, mainstream descriptor that can incite a huge demonstration involving millions of people, that leads to an even larger one.

Ideas, anyone?

What would be the overall strategy? Sam believes it should be locally based, with a range of entry points and a broad set of supporters. (Sam and the Vietnam Moratorium Committee sought the support of groups like the Civil Rights Movement, churches, university faculties, unions, business leaders, and politicians.)

He points out that modern means of communication makes something like this radically easier to organize. The additional good news is that Trump has pissed off nearly everyone, even those who won’t yet admit it.

But Sam believes we need to find a way to gain the support of conservative opinion leaders like David Brooks. This takes some time and a great deal of thoughtful networking.

What do you think?

NOW READ:Breathing is now a political act — thanks to the GOP

---

---

Learning and Researching our Movement History | The Forge

Maggie Corser and writer Derek Seidman delve into the power of movement research and its ongoing impact on campaign strategy throughout movement history

We’re living through an intensification of crises around inequality, democracy, climate, and militarism. There is a lot at stake when it comes to building stronger movements. In the past, power research has provided critical – even indispensable – support for movements and campaigns, helping to shape strategy and educate and empower the base.

Moreover, while a lot has stayed the same in approaching movement research, things have also evolved. Today, we have access to sources, new technologies, and new modes of communication that past researchers could only dream about. With all this, the potential impact of research for campaigns – research efforts that are already happening and could be expanded wider and deeper throughout our movements – has only heightened.

We sought to identify key principles and lessons, as well as the nitty-gritty research methods from past liberation efforts that can guide us today. From the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and antiwar and student movements to the 1960s, to more contemporary worker unionization fights like Justice for Janitors in the 1980s and 1990s, we believe these historical case studies offer incredible insights and practical lessons for organizers and researchers alike.

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee of the 1960s

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was one of the most impactful civil rights organizations of the 1960s, leading the fight to dismantle Jim Crow segregationist policies through nonviolent civil disobedience, large scale voter registration, and leadership development. But while SNCC’s grassroots organizing is well-known, SNCC also had a sophisticated and well-resourced research department to advance its organizing work.

SNCC’s research department formed in 1962 with a clear mandate: to produce strategic research“directly or indirectly, related to field requests, or staff training and education.” It produced work that bolstered on-the-ground efforts in numerous ways. Detailed statistical profiles on demographics, poverty rates, and voter registration helped organizers better understand the communities they were organizing within. Power maps and opposition and corporate target research fine-tuned SNCC’s grasp on who they were up against.

SNCC researchers also supported popular education, contributing to curriculum and leaflets with compelling facts and figures, and they copiously documented the realities of violence facing local communities. They helped forge viable campaign demands, like when SNCC research director Jack Minnis closely reviewed 12 volumes of the Alabama Code of Law to identify an obscure statute that allowed SNCC to form a new, independent political party in Lowndes County, Alabama.

Crucially, research was not a top-down process in SNCC. Organizers and researchers worked together in close collaboration toward a common cause. The demands and urgencies of organizers shaped research agendas, and researchers contributed to organizing efforts. Within SNCC, its research and organizing arms operated as a single unit with constant interaction.

“Who Rules Columbia?” and 1960s Campus Protest Movements

The campus antiwar movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s produced a wave of case studies of university power, but none were more influential than “Who Rules Columbia?,” a 34-page pamphlet published during the 1968 Columbia University uprising against the school’s ties to war and racism.

“Who Rules Columbia?” was a power research tour de forcethat mapped out the university’s close connections to the wider corporate power structure and the war machine. It showed how Columbia, through its investments and board of trustees, was interlocked with the military-industrial complex, Wall Street, and real estate interests. It offered the student movement a powerful analysis of how the American university was a critical component within a larger system of corporate domination.

Though produced nearly six decades ago, the research process behind “Who Rules Columbia?” mirrors our own today. Researchers worked collaboratively, mining news reports, property records, and university documents. They produced research prose, but also network maps that provided a visual picture of the composition of the heights of power at Columbia.

“Who Rules Columbia?” left a tremendous legacy for the movement. Today, campus organizers across the U.S. pushing for divestment from Israeli atrocities against Palestinians have explicitly drawn inspiration and even benefited from direct mentorship from the pamphlet’s original authors.

Whether you’re taking on the presence of fossil fuel interests or private prison profiteers at your college, or building coalitions between students and community members to support campus workers, you benefit from the legacy of “Who Rules Columbia?” and its analysis of the corporate university.

Researchers against the War Machine: NARMIC and the Antiwar Movement

During the U.S. war on Vietnam, power research directly supported the antiwar movement, with one organization playing a particularly critical role. National Action/Research on the Military-Industrial Complex (NARMIC), founded in 1969, functioned as the “research arm” of the U.S. peace movement, and for over a decade it assisted mass movements against war and militarism.

NARMIC’s small circle of researchers dug into obscure Pentagon sources to expose to a wider movement audience the weapons systems that the U.S. military was using against the Vietnamese people. Even more, they mapped out the major corporate war profiteers benefitting from the massive weapons contracts.

Examples of NARMIC’s impactful work include its yearly lists of the top 100 defense contractors in the U.S., its “Movement Guide to Stockholders Meetings,” and “Automated Air War” handbook that surveyed the different weapons and aircrafts used in the aerial war against Vietnam. NARMIC also turned “Automated Air War” into an innovative slideshow with a script that organizers across the nation could use in public events.

NARMIC’s support for the antiwar movement was not abstract. Localities would regularly call the group’s headquarters for advice on nearby weapons profiteers to protest. NARMIC researchers constantly educated the wider public through talks at everywhere from churches to campus.

Through all this, NARMIC transformed a moral critique of the war to include a deeper awareness of the living and breathing corporations that were arming, perpetuating, and profiting from the war. Researchers today — with the American Service Friends Committee, for example, who NARMIC was connected to – still draw on NARMIC’s inspiring example.

The SEIU Justice for Janitors Campaigns of the 1980s and 1990s

In the 1980s, commercial real estate owners increasingly subcontracted out their cleaning services to non-union janitorial companies in order to cut costs and maximize profits. Some unions in places like Los Angeles lost 75% of their membership during this time. The workers, who were largely immigrant women and men, many undocumented, worked for contractors rather than the building owners directly. They faced enormous precarity, poverty wages, and unfair labor practices. Unionization attempts frequently failed in the face of union busting.

In response, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) decided to pilot new approaches. Rather than target individual subcontractors or buildings, the union shifted the fight to the commercial real estate industry. Launched in in Denver in 1986 and LA in 1988, Justice for Janitors (J4J) developed an innovative organizing model that secured vital protections for people in janitorial services. The campaign developed a sophisticated and highly effective approach — indeed, some might say a blueprint — to strategic research that shaped how strategic corporate research is employed to this day.

First, they used industry mapping that was designed to understand the market in each geography. Through a mix of intensive desk research and field intel, they identified the building owners, building managers, and cleaning contractors across thousands of buildings — no easy task given the opaque and fissured nature of the sector. They also compiled profiles on corporate leadership, major competitors, shareholders, real estate operations, upcoming development projects, and any known worker safety or other legal violations.

Second, they used power structure analysisthat helped identify key players and sources of leverage. The rapidly changing nature of the commercial real estate industry meant that power mapping was essential to winning. J4J researchers profiled CEOs and conducted opposition research on their business connections, political contributions, tax subsidies, and philanthropic giving.

Lessons and Legacies for Today

What lessons can, today, draw from this rich history of movement power research?

First, research plays a critical role in supporting and shaping movement strategy and tactics.

While this may be apparent to some, it’s worth restating. Across all the case studies we reviewed, researchers and research centers offered crucial support to field operations, local campaigns, and street protests. Power can be opaque, and it’s not always, or even often, apparent to organizers who to target and how. Mapping out power structures helps guide strategy, identify points of leverage, and expand the surface area of attack.

Moreover, strategic research should be conducted at the outset as a foundational part of a campaign — not just an afterthought — in order to identify the best targets and sources of leverage.

J4J organizer Jono Shaffer drilled down his key organizing principles as such:“Principle one is you can’t win if you fight the wrong target. And principle two is, you can’t win if you hit the right target in the wrong place […] And so research is essential to identifying the right targets.”In other words, research helps identify where targets are most vulnerable and then campaigns can tailor tactics and demands to maximize impact.

Second, power research educates and emboldens and draws from the base.

It gives organizers and rank-and-file activists a fuller picture of what they’re up against and where they might locate paths toward progress or even victory. Lists, visual maps, and illustrations, especially, make even complex power structures more accessible. Research helped cohere organizations around shared analysis.

Even better, movements can democratize the research process. Through trainings, how-to guides, and facilitation, activists, workers, and community members can collectively map out power structures themselves, and this can be empowering.

This also means community and worker intel is vital. As SNCC staffer Jesse Harris told Howard Zinn in 1965: “…[w]e went around from communities, finding out, doing – in other words we were doing research – finding out why people wouldn’t register to vote, and why they haven’t tried to go down and participate. Why did the local power structure refuse to let people go down and register?“

Third, the history of movement research shows the importance of creative and collaborative research processes where research and organizingintentionallygo hand in hand.

Organizers, workers, and communities must directly inform movement research agendas, and experienced researchers can support by providing data and findings that open up strategic and tactical paths that are not necessarily apparent. Communication and collaboration, and a division of labor within projects, generates research that is often more than the sum of its parts.

Moreover, to ensure strategic research is applied helpfully, it’s critical to have researchers, organizers, and communicators, and community members all involved in strategy from the start. NARMIC regularly met with an advisory committee of antiwar groups to hammer out research ideas. The SNCC Research Department needed forensic researchers to support some of its most critical campaigns, but those researchers relied heavily on group strategists and field organizers to guide research goals.

And while desk research was vital for Justice for Janitors campaigns, sometimes they would find the most impactful information in the field – for example, when a J4J organizer passed a construction site with a “coming soon” promotional sign listing Wells Fargo advisors and key pension fund investors like the Ohio Public Employees Retirement System, which J4J then successfully engaged to bring the owner to the table.

Finally, it’s critical to find mediums to communicate research clearly and accessible to the public.

Noel Day, who drafted the Freedom School curriculum that SNCC helped organize, once said: “Research needs to be intensive; what are the facts, how do they relate to the needs of the community, what is the best method of attack and why, etc.” But he also said that “Interpretation should be simple and clear.“

While analysis done by researchers in the case studies we examined was rigorous and detailed, the movements also found effective ways to communicate research to a wider audience. NARMIC produced visual slideshows on weapons’ systems. The authors of “Who Rules Columbia?” made visual maps of the campus power structure. SNCC put together educational “picture-stories” to support the campaign to build the Lowndes County Freedom Party. J4J researchers determined that for a “penny per square foot” you could give janitors living wages and health insurance, and this simple data point became a banner demand across J4J campaigns.

Continuing the Movement Research Tradition

In our current moment – and likely, for the foreseeable future — we will see no shortage of crises generating protest and resistance movements that call for all hands on deck.

It’s vital that we carry with us a deep sense of the indispensability of research for movements, past, present and future – something that we can all better understand by looking at our own movement histories.

For resources on movement research and power-mapping, see:

---

AN NO LNX

Betrayal of the American Dream: How Democrats lost FDR’s middle class

Thom Hartmann November 13, 2024

The great lesson of the election of 2024 is that, to a large extent, class has replaced race as the single most potent political dividing line.

In 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt took office and began a great experiment. Was it, he asked, really possible to create a society where more than half of a democratic and capitalist nation could enjoy a middle-class lifestyle? On the day of his inauguration the best estimate is that only about 15 percent of Americans had reached that economic milestone.

Back at the founding of our republic, several philosophers and economists suggested it was possible for a majority-middle-class society to emerge on this continent. Adam Smith (of the 1776 Wealth of Nations fame) wrote a book Theory of Moral Sentiments arguing that if a nation were to intervene in the marketplace in “moral” ways that uplifted working class people, such a society could emerge.

Thomas Paine similarly argued in Agrarian Justice for a number of progressive reforms including what today we call Social Security, a guaranteed minimum income, free public education, and the inheritance tax.

NOW READ: The truth bomb too many Democrats need to hear

But from the beginning of America until 1933 most of these dreams were unrealized.

As Smith had intimated in Theory, unregulated capitalism would always produce the outcome Charles Dickens later wrote about in the 19th century: A top 1% that owns about 80% of the nation’s wealth, a middle 3%-5% professional class (doctors, lawyers, small business owners), and around 95% of the people representing a desperate working class living in abject poverty.

(In A Christmas Carol, Ebenezer Scrooge was the middle class; his company was so small it had only one single employee, Bob Cratchit, who represented the bottom 95%. The 1% don’t even show up in most of Dickens’ stories.)

FDR, though, with help from Francis Perkins, his wife Eleanor, and economist John Maynard Keynes thought he could tame capitalism and the capitalists themselves (he accusingly called them the “Economic Royalists”) and set out with his New Deal programs — legalizing unions, minimum wage, unemployment insurance, Social Security, government subsidies for the working poor, etc. — to create a vast American middle class.

This was the beginning of the modern Democratic Party, and the middle class was its great accomplishment; by the time Reagan took office about two-thirds of us were in that group with a single paycheck earning enough to buy a house, a car, take an annual vacation, put the kids through school, and retire with dignity.

Reagan broke with FDR’s policies that he’d once supported (in exchange for the promise of riches and a career from his second wife’s father), and took a meataxe to the New Deal. He busted unions, cut the top income tax bracket from 74% to 25%, and embraced free trade, allowing American manufacturing companies to go offshore in search of cheaper labor.

The result is that only 43% of us are in the middle class today. Adding insult to injury, it takes two full-time workers to get where a single paycheck could in 1980.

This was the beginning of the downfall of today’s Democratic Party, which has been buffeted by the twin winds of Reagan’s neoliberalism from the right and so-called “woke” identity politics on the left.

Trump and his Republican buddies cynically attacked Democrats for their embrace of Reagan’s policies, claiming that the shrinking of the middle class was because Black people and women were competing with white men for all those good jobs and Hispanics were diluting the labor market. At the same time, they argued, Democrats had gone too far in embracing marginalized minorities, particularly (in this election) the Trans community.

Ironically, Kamala Harris never once mentioned the Trans community while campaigning over the past three months, but Trump and the GOP relentlessly beat her over the head with a Willie Horton-like ad about giving free surgeries to Trans immigrants in prison. In this regard, the group using identity politics for political purposes was the Republican Party.

But the biggest lesson of this election is that class has supplanted race and other identity markers as the issue that motivated voters. Working class people in or aspiring to the middle class — including Hispanics, young white men, and to a smaller extent African American men — rejected economic policy (like Harris laid out) and racial, gender, or age cohort identity in exchange for the promise of good jobs and lower prices.

Sure, there was still a lot of identity politics at work: Trump’s anti-Trans ads are the best example, along with his relentless insistence that our nation’s immigrant population are mostly murderers, rapists, and thieves. And it may have been decisive on the margins.

But at its core, what we’re seeing in America is a realignment around class (its own form of identity politics). The middle class and its aspirants that had been supporters of the Democratic Party since the 1930s are now in the pocket of Republicans.

Part of this is the result of a massive, 40-year-long propaganda effort by billionaire-built media empires including talk radio (also in Spanish), three rightwing TV networks, Sinclair radio and TV, social media, and tending-right newspapers. Part is because in 2010 five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized billionaires owning politicians and overwhelming elections with the “free speech” of their money.

But most substantially, as Bernie Sanders pointed out last week, it’s the result of the timeless class struggle between working people and what the GOP calls “the elites” (college-educated, upper-income professionals). The former broke big for Trump, the latter for Harris. And millions of minorities, particularly Hispanic men, rejected identity politics for the GOP’s class struggle pitch.

This dynamic is almost identical to the class struggle that brought FDR into power in 1933 and got him elected four times to the presidency, except that the party labels are now — hopefully temporarily — reversed.

The challenge for Democrats is to engage in their own class warfare, particularly since a good chunk of the Party (like the so-called “Problem Solvers Caucus”) are still on the take from big corporations and billionaires.

In this, the Congressional Progressive Caucus can be a great force to reclaim working people, rejecting both Reaganism’s hold on the Democratic Party (both Clinton and Obama embraced neoliberalism, and Biden’s rejection of it is largely unknown) and the notion that voters will always respond to race and gender rather than class.

If Democrats are to regain the working class as a solid and permanent constituency (which they owned from the 1930s to the 1990s), in other words, they must amplify Biden’s and Harris’ fights for higher taxes on billionaires and lower taxes on working people, universal healthcare and free college, reasonably priced housing, raising the federal minimum wage, protecting the right to organize, increase Social Security, and turn billionaires and greedy CEOs into an identifiable group voters can rightfully loathe. Attacking Republicans on the Supreme Court and their Citizens United decision is also vital.

As Kentucky’s Democratic Governor Andy Beshear wrote for The New York Times yesterday:

“I won re-election 12 months ago by five points in a state that Donald Trump just carried by 30 points. … The focus of the Democratic Party must return to creating better jobs, more affordable and accessible health care, safer roads and bridges, the best education for our children and communities where people aren’t just safer but also feel safer.“

This doesn’t mean Democrats have to abandon allies representing racial, religious, and gender minorities as some are suggesting; that would be both a betrayal and political suicide.

But it’s way past time for a significant recalibration, particularly at the grassroots/working class level. As Pete Davis writes in The Nation:

“Instead of funding itself primarily through membership dues, the [Democratic] party offers fancy events for the wealthy and ceaseless, disrespectful texts for the rest of us. Parasocial relationships with celebrities and famous politicians are emphasized over real relationships with fellow neighbors and local chapter leaders.

“When you go to Democrats.org, clicking ‘Take Action’ does not direct you to a page with your local Democratic committee’s meeting times and locations. The bolded call-to-action button on the party homepage is ‘DONATE,’ not ‘JOIN.’”

Thus, as Trump rolls out his cabinet and policies — which will primarily benefit the morbidly rich and giant predatory corporations — Democrats must pound on the class warfare aspect of what the GOP is really up to.

The Democratic Party has done it before and held power for half a century; they need to do it again. With gusto!

NOW READ: The truth bomb too many Democrats need to hear

---

the Great Awokening?

https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/trump-nixon/

an 121 salon

Americans were shocked to watch as American stormtroopers assaulted the U. S. capitol building, smashing windows, roaming through the building and the floors of both Senate and House, including sitting in the seat of the Senate's presiding officer, leaving incendiary devices nearby, etc.).

This was more than a whiff of fascism. This is what fascism looks like.

So, we have to ask: beyond the lying, insurrection-instigating, so-called President, how did we get here?

The story actually goes a long way back.

First, the more obvious Republican side of the story:

Although his administration did eventually oversee some environmental protections, President Richard Nixon gained the White House via a law and order campaign in 1968, appealing to the so-called "silent majority" who were frightened, if not alienated, by the images of antiwar protesters, inner-city "rioters," and counterculture "freaks" during the 1960s.

The mass media, of course, fed this dynamic by refusing to take seriously the actual claims of Black, antiwar, and feminist activists; instead, making sure the public saw the most inflammatory examples of their behaviors and appearances. That's a story I have documented elsewhere.

Nixon's election and his "Southern Strategy" set in stone the future of the Republican party, although it remained for Ronald Reagan to seal the deal. Reagan's rhetoric about basic "decency" and "family values," fed the grievances of those who felt left out of, or alienated by, the '60s. But crucially, Reagan's actual policies focused on eliminating ways the government addresses public needs, instead cutting taxes on the wealthy, rebuilding a huge military complex and aggressive foreign policy, and deregulating the economy.

However, the people drawn to so-called conservative rhetoric — whether religious traditionalists, rural folks or members of the white working class — were not the actual winners under Reagan. Instead, they lost more and more ground economically. They basically got symbolic gratification. Their attention was instead diverted to the Democrats, liberals and "Eastern elites" who "caused" their problems.

That's the path that leads directly to Trump and his True Believers.

What, then, of the Democratic Party?

That, too, is a long story. In the midst of the Reagan years, smarting from Nixon's humiliating victory in 1972 and Reagan's in 1984, Democratic centrists — names like Dick Gephardt, Sam Nunn, Bill Clinton [TONY COELHO]— took steps to move the party away from its more liberal wing and into the corporate-dependent center. In its more liberal moments the Democratic Party typically expressed hopeful rhetoric about defending the rights of minorities, women and LGBTQ people, defending the environment, etc. The reality consistently fell far short of the rhetoric.

So, in our two-party system, Republicans have been all about give-aways to the rich while manipulating the emotions of less well-off white Americans. Democrats have essentially ignored the latter populations, becoming increasingly dependent on corporate money while also manipulating the aspirations of marginalized communities.

Neither party speaks a word against a capitalist system that feeds inequality, threatens the planet's ability to sustain life, and generates a foreign policy marked by militarism and war. The "problem" is always the "other party."

In their more liberal moments, Democrats embrace what is often called "identity politics" — race, gender, and sexuality in particular. This rhetorical embrace is used by Republicans to feed the emotional attachment of their rank and file supporters. Democrats gain support when Republican rhetoric becomes outrageous. Clearly, the political center, with all its sanctimonious rhetoric, is reinforced when something like the Capitol assault occurs.

Yet the country remains stuck in this see-saw battle that goes nowhere. Beholden to corporate wealth, neither party dares to confront class inequality. Yet, unlike identity concerns about discrimination, hate speech, and oppression — all serious problems — class analysis reveals the systemic forces that lie behind these and keep both parties' rank-and-file in their place at the margins of American politics.

Ultimately, the only way out of this will occur when enough people becomeaware, not only of the seriousness of the hazards facing us, but of the need to come together in a well-mobilized mass movement addressing systemic concerns.We already see where we're heading if we don't do this.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/trump-democrats/

monbiot build social movement

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/with-propaganda-channel-fox-news-creating-firewall-for-trump-critics-says-mass-mobilization-needed-to-oust-president/

no lnx

With ‘propaganda channel’ Fox News creating firewall for Trump, critics says mass mobilization needed to oust president

Written by Julia Conley / Common Dreams October 23, 2019

A new survey released Sunday reveals just how impenetrable President Donald Trump’s level of support among regular Fox News viewers is, and suggests that a mass mobilization among those who support impeaching and removing Trump from office may be the only way Congress will finally hold him to account.

The Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) polled 2,000 people and found that among Republican voters who use Fox News as their regular news source, 55 percent said that no action taken by Trump could cause them to oppose him.

The findings bolstered the president’s statement, made during the 2016 election, that he “could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and [he] wouldn’t lose any voters.”

But the results varied for Republicans who don’t regularly turn to Fox for their news; only 29 percent of them said there was nothing Trump could do to lose their approval, and only 39 percent said they strongly approve of the president.

Ninety percent of Republicans who don’t watch Fox regularly said they don’t support impeachment and removal of Trump from office, compared to 98 percent of those who do watch Fox.

The former number “is overwhelmingly high,” Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent wrote, “but suggests that among this group, at least, Trump could suffer losses on the margins as the inquiry turns up worse revelations.”

As journalist Mehdi Hasan wrote on Twitter on Tuesday, Fox News is “not just a conservative news outlet. It is a propaganda channel for the president and his party, and there is no liberal or centrist equivalent to it.”

Mehdi Hasan

?

@mehdirhasan

This is what a lot of well-meaning liberals don’t understand about Fox - it’s not just a conservative news outlet. It is a propaganda channel for the president and his party, and there is no liberal or centrist equivalent to it. https://twitter.com/millicentsomer/status/1186288529938104320 …

Lili Loofbourow

?

@Millicentsomer

“The poll ... finds that an astonishing 55% of Republicans who watch Fox News as their primary news source say there is almost nothing Trump could do to lose their approval. By contrast, only 29% of Republicans who don’t cite Fox as their primary source say this.” https://twitter.com/brianbeutler/status/1186286472128880641 …

23.2K

8:31 PM - Oct 21, 2019

Twitter Ads info and privacy

6,728 people are talking about this

Hasan later highlighted an on-air remark from Fox News host Mark Levin that “there hasn’t even been a hint of scandal” since Trump took office as further proof that the network offers “just pure and endless propaganda.”

@mehdirhasan

I said it last night and I will say it again: Fox News doesn’t even pretend to be a news channel anymore and is now just pure and endless propaganda on behalf of this scandal-ridden President. https://twitter.com/jasonscampbell/status/1186627394708365315 …

Jason Campbell

@JasonSCampbell

Mark Levin: "While [Trump's] been president there hasn't even been a hint of scandal. Not a hint."

Embedded video

Trump notoriously watches several hours of Fox News on a daily basis and has been known to regularly speak with host Sean Hannity after Hannity ends his nightly show.

As Sargent wrote in the Post, the network’s coverage of Trump’s recent plan to host next year’s G7 summit at his resort in Doral, Florida—a violation of the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause—played a role in reversing the president’s decision:

Trump pulled the plug on his corrupt scheme to host the Group of Seven summit at his Doral resort after getting informed that some moderate Republicans—the ones he needs to keep in line on impeachment—didn’t want to defend it, amid indications that it would become part of the case for impeachment. He also witnessed some Fox News personalities disapproving of it…That’s when Trump concluded the jig was up on Doral, the New York Times reports.

According to Sargent, with both Trump and his most loyal supporters tuning in to Fox News on a regular basis, the network serves to reassure his base that Trump has done nothing wrong to deserve the impeachment inquiry House Democrats have initiated, while protecting the president from real accountability:

It’s difficult to say whether Republicans watch Fox because they’re already in lockstep with Trump, or whether they’re inclined that way because of what Fox tells them. But these things seem to reinforce one another—and that may prove a significant factor in keeping GOP lawmakers in line behind him.

[…]

This hermetically sealed-off version of reality has created a space in which Republicans are backing Trump because he’s only done right.

In recent days, Trump critics including New York Times columnist David Leonhardt and Crooked Media editor Brian Beutler have argued that with Fox News at the president’s disposal and Fox‘s Republican viewers showing no sign of abandoning Trump, the president is essentially protected from impeachment unless a mass mobilization is begun by the at least 50 percent of Americans who do support his removal.

“The Fox effect is protecting Trump from removal, and mass mobilization is likely the only way for impeachment supporters to overcome it,” Beutler tweeted.

Leonhardt on Sunday wrote that Fox‘s hold on Republican voters makes it increasingly unlikely that their Republican representatives in Congress will defect and announce their support for impeachment.

“Protest may be more important than in the past, because the elite institutions that helped bring down Richard Nixon, like political parties and the national media, are weaker today,” he wrote.

A mass protest “can wake up more Americans to the gravity of the situation,” Leonhardt added. “It can mobilize progressives to work as hard as they did during the 2018 midterms. It can confront congressional Republicans with their cowardice.”

bioneers co-fdr calls it a movement of movements 10/18

https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/a-harvard-professor-explains-how-social-movements-that-create-broad-social-change-become-possible/

At the heart of all politics and activism is the concept of change. People agitate, organize and vote because they believe that they can affect change in the world — or, in some cases, reverse changes that have already happened. But the process of change can be a bit mysterious. How does it happen? How can people make it happen?

In his new book, “How Change Happens,” Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein tackles these larger issues, looking at a history of social change and analyzing it for lessons that could be useful for those who seek to make changes to the status quo. He sat down with me recently on “Salon Talks” to discuss the way social movements get started and why what used to be considered common sense or can sometimes transform with surprising speed.

Watch my “Salon Talks” conversation with Cass Sunstein here. This transcript has been edited for clarity and length.

This is a huge topic in a lot of ways, how does change happen. And I think it’s an issue that’s on the forefront of a lot of people’s minds these days. When Barack Obama was elected he ran on a platform of “hope and change,” and then we saw Donald Trump be elected in reaction to that. The sense, I think, is growing in a lot of quarters that change may not be possible. Your book delivers the opposite message: Change is possible and there’s reason for hope.

That’s a good point: Change can go in all sorts of directions. You seem to posit that we are in an era of a lot of social upheaval. And one movement that you single out is the Me Too movement, which was a fairly dramatic shift in the way the public thinks about and reacts to sexual harassment. How does what happened there fit into your theory of change?

OK. So with MeToo, it was a recent example of where people living under circumstances of, let’s say, injustice or oppression or horror have often been quiet about what happened to them or about what they actually hope will happen in the future, and they need a kind of permission slip or a green light. And we all have in our minds, with respect to at least one issue, maybe 12 issues, a sense that things aren’t as they should be. But whether we give voice to them depends on whether there’s a green light or not.

The American Revolution which created our country was basically a green light emerging as people said, “Independence is a good idea.” In the civil rights movement of the 1960s, Rosa Parks was in some ways a heroic but ordinary person. Not someone who sought the limelight. She was not ordinary in her soul but ordinary in the sense that she didn’t have public office or a big pulpit. But she created a permission slip for lots of people to defy segregation. And Martin Luther King, of course, was the organizing thinker and voice behind a lot of disclosure of what people actually thought should happen and about what people experienced that wasn’t good, or that was worse than not good.

And under MeToo, what happened was a lot of women who had somewhere between bad and horrific experiences were authorized really by the courage of others to say, “Me too.” We’re not where we should be with respect to sexual violence and sexual harassment. But there are a lot of people, men as well as women — though mostly women — who are not going to be subject to stuff because the movement has been so vocal and norm-shifting.

Sure. Under President Obama, whether you love him or not, we had the most important social legislation since the 1960s. That’s the Affordable Care Act. We had the most important financial regulation since the 1930s. That’s Dodd-Frank. We had the most aggressive environmental movement probably ever in the sense of clean air, particulate matter, ozone, nitrogen oxide and more.

And that doesn’t even mention climate, and a great deal has been done on climate. And that doesn’t even refer to what was done on civil rights, with respect to sex equality and sexual orientation discrimination, where the change is remarkable that we lived through. And that doesn’t even mention what happens with effect to tobacco, where we had the most aggressive anti-tobacco basically in the nation’s history.

Now, a lot of this is contested, and so it doesn’t seem like we had a sea change — but, gosh we did. And whether you like President Trump or not, and I gather you’re not a huge fan, he has changed significant things. So, whether it’s hope or the opposite, he hasn’t been a status quo president by any means.

Well, I think that’s very interesting. Something that was once maybe not a taboo but close to it suddenly is no longer a taboo. How does that happen? What is the catalyst that causes a situation where once people felt they couldn’t say anything and now they feel like they can?

So we all live in accordance with norms that we either don’t like but just accept, or in some cases that we despise, but we have to accept because they’re norms. It might about what you wear, it might be about who you can date, it might be about your workplace. What has to happen for the change to occur is the norm has to be under some pressure, either because someone courageous has said the norm’s not good, which means that the second person who says that doesn’t seem like a crazy person or a rebel but seems brave rather than reckless. And then once there are two, a third person can say, “This isn’t good. I agree with that.”

And once there are three, and you can think of three as a metaphor for 300 or 3,000, then you can have something very large like the environmental movement which worked in large part in this way, where there were people breathing dirty air in New York or Los Angeles or Massachusetts and they thought, “What can we do about it?” Or, “If we say something about it, we’ll look like we’re radical, anti-business people.”

But once the norm in favor of combating pollution started to get energized, and the norm in favor of shutting up people who objected to it started to soften, then you could have a tipping point, where the original norm was, “You can’t say this,” and then the norm became, “You have to say this.”

A lot of people who would pick up your book, I would assume, would be activists who are trying to effect change in this world. What advice would you give to somebody who wants to cause that kind of tipping point to happen?

Let me tell you about someone I follow on Twitter who has a book that is on behavioral finance. That’s not a hot topic. But he tweets, “People are buying and enjoying my book. Thank you for the support.” That’s really smart. He’s establishing, I hope truthfully, the existence of some popularity for his own particular cause, which is his excellent but not very popular book.

So, there’s a lesson there, which is if you want to spur a movement, to give strong signals either of the current surprising popularity of the movement, or, if you don’t have that, of the growing popularity of the movement, that can often be extremely helpful because it licenses people to join and it may un-license people to stigmatize.

So if you think of the anti-smoking movement or the seatbelt buckling movement, neither of these is radical stuff, but they’re both really important. They’ve saved a lot of lives. The idea that you should be allowed to tell smokers who are in your room, “Please stop, it’s offensive or making me sick,” or tell someone in your family, “Please stop smoking, you’re endangering your life,” or tell someone, “Buckle your seatbelt,” that became possible once the movements for seatbelts and the movements against cigarette smoking were signaled by those who supported those movements as something that had a lot of members.

President Trump has been pretty ingenious at signaling that his movement has a lot of members, even at a time when it didn’t much. So to emphasize that this is a growing movement, this is a popular movement, there’s real room here, there’s oxygen, that is often a very astute method of creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.

And there’s the negative side of this. I mean, the focus in your book is mostly on good things, like restricting smoking and enforcing seatbelts. But what we’ve seen in this country happen recently is a rise of white nationalism, through a similar dynamic. You’re beginning to see a lot more people say blatantly racist things that they would have felt were taboo in previous years. When we see something like that happen, when we see change happening in that negative way, is there a way to get our taboos back?

It’s a great question. And we’ve seen, with respect to racism and sexism, flows one way or the other, and in some ways the flow is not ideal right now. What has to happen is that people who are in favor of, let’s say, the norm of mutual respect, or of treating people decently — I’m not using the word tolerance because it’s not the best word, it suggests there’s something wrong — have to emphasize it and not be shy about that. So to stigmatize certain actions like assault, that’s a good thing to do. And to stigmatize people who are fomenting hatred is also a good thing to do.

Now, if the people who are showing let’s say a tendency to racist talk or are on the cusp, then to stigmatize them might be a little impersonal. More to engage them and appeal to the better angels of their nature. Abraham Lincoln was a genius at that, Lyndon Johnson was pretty good and President Obama, in modern times, is an all-star.

Speaking about stigmatization and other kinds of negative enforcement, one thing that you write about it in this book but you’re already famous for is your idea of nudges. Shaping behavior with not particularly abrupt mandates or bans, or even stigma. I should ask you what the nudge theory is and the basics, because I suspect a lot of our viewers or readers don’t necessarily know.

So if you want to affect behavior, you can prohibit something or you can subsidize it or you can tax it or you can mandate something. You can also do a nudge, which is something that completely preserves freedom of choice. So a GPS device is a nudge. You can say, “I want to go to Brooklyn rather than Manhattan,” and the GPS device won’t fight you on that. And the GPS device takes you on a route that you think is not pretty, or which is likely to run into traffic, in your opinion, you can say, “I don’t like the advice.” So it preserves freedom of choice.

Many governments, and when I was in the White House we did a lot of this, do things like a GPS device. So, if you go to a restaurant you can see the calorie count. And if you want the cheeseburger, go for it, but you’re being nudged in favor of a healthier option. Or if you’re getting sunscreen, let’s say, and while it’s going to be good for tanning it’s not going to reduce the risk of cancer, there’s something right on the can which will give you clarity on that. And that will nudge you to choose something that will reduce the risk of cancer.TRANPARENCY?

There are other more aggressive nudges. For example, automatic enrollment in a pension plan. The United States, partly because of private employers, partly because of the government, has seen an explosion of automatic enrollment, and that is a nudge. You can say, “I don’t want to be in that stupid plan.” You have freedom of choice. But the plan is massively increasing the number of people who are going have more comfortable retirements.

And with respect to — this is I think the most poignant nudge I know, poignant in a good way — poor children in the United States are eligible forfree school lunches and breakfasts. But their parents don’t sign them up, for any number of reasons. It might be that an envelope from the government is not exactly welcome. It might be they’re really busy handling a lot of problems and how do you deal with this bureaucracy.

So, what we did, and this is something the Republicans have not shifted away from, is to say that the kids are automatically in. Unless they are not eligible, so long as the school district knows, they’re automatically in. And that means approximately 9 million to 11 million kids in a given year are getting access to free meals, and that can change their families’ days and weeks and years and maybe even the kids’ futures.

We can do a lot more of that. And these are not mandates. If the family doesn’t want the kid to have that meal, maybe they want them to bring some meal that is tastier. Or if it conflicts with some religious conviction, they can completely do that. So nudges are freedom-preserving interventions that sometimes can get millions of people to have safer, longer or less expensive lives.

Obviously there are limits to this idea. We’re seeing, with the vaccination issue right now, a lot of criticism that there are not strong enough mandates. When do we know that it’s time to shift to a mandate instead of a nudge?

It’s a great question. If people are doing something that hurts other people, probably you want to prohibit them from doing that. So the problem of climate change is not one that can be adequately handled through fuel-economy labels on cars and energy-efficiency labels. Those help, but they can’t do enough. You need to have mandates and fuel economy standards and energy efficiency standards in addition, to protect others.

If it’s a case where someone is making a decision that’s going to hurt their future self, like they’re not saving for retirement, then you might think the Social Security system is a good idea even though it’s mandatory. Or you might think that if people are risking their future because they’re getting addicted to cigarettes, then you might think that health warnings are not enough and a stiff cigarette tax is a good way of discouraging people from starting and encouraging people to stop. Where people are making decisions that hurt their future self, that’s a good one.

Generally with parents dealing with their kids, mandates are not the best idea. But in the case of vaccination it’s very delicate, because if parents are making decisions that endanger their own children’s health, or which mean that their own children are gonna risk other people’s health, then a discussion of something beyond a nudge is a good discussion to have.

The decline in smoking in America was a process of a number of different government policies that were influential. With the kind of widespread ban of indoor smoking, where do you put that on the scale? That didn’t stop people from smoking, they could still smoke if they wanted to, just in fewer places. Is that a mandate or is it more of a nudge?

It’s a mandate. We have plenty of nudges. On a pack, there’s a warning there. And the government has a lot of educational campaigns that are nudges. Insofar as you can’t smoke in certain places, that’s a ban. Now, because over 400,000 Americans die every year from smoking — and it’s worth pausing over that figure. That’s not just a statistic, that’s human beings that are leaving families as well as their own time on the planet prematurely. Each one of those is a tragedy and a horror, so we should do more, including nudges.

So when I was in the government we issued a regulation that would have graphic health warnings on the pack. On technical grounds, the federal courts struck that down. I regret that decision. I think that was a mistaken decision. But whether or not it’s mistaken, the government is legally obliged to come up now with new graphic warnings and the Trump administration hasn’t done what the law requires it to do. There’s every reason to think that that would help. Would it save 400,000 people? No. If it saves 10,000, that’s phenomenal. If it saves 1,000, that’s good.

To have a higher cigarette tax would be a really good idea. That would discourage people from starting, especially poor people. So it would have a distributive good impact as well as a public health impact. And current smokers, it would encourage them to quit. So to increase significantly the cigarette tax, I’m generally cautious about cigarette taxes, and about taxes insofar as they don’t affect people who have plenty of money, and a lot of smokers don’t have money. But this is a good tax not to be cautious about.

With the money, we can retire the deficit. Not the whole deficit, a little piece of the deficit. We can use it to reduce the deficit, or we can give the money who people who need it or we can give it for our national defense or whatever.

I remember when you first started taking this idea out, one of the criticisms of nudges as a policy idea, there was an almost paranoia about it. I think in our society there’s a fear of being subtly manipulated, that it’s somehow robbing you of your freedom. That’s gotten worse, I think, in the age of social media, because we know that Facebook and Twitter are using algorithms to manipulate people’s behavior. How do we think about nudges in the context of that fear of being manipulated?

I think we need something like a Bill of Rights for nudging when we’re talking about the government. And nudges are less powerful than mandates and bans, because a lot of people go their own way. Nonetheless, we need a Bill of Rights for nudging. Something like, they have to be consistent with the interests and values of the people to whom they’re applied. So people, unless they’re conspiracy theorists they tend not to object to the fact that the GPS is telling them how to get where they want to go. If you have a medicine that has nudges against excessive use, that’s not scary manipulation, it’s in the interest of the chooser. It has to be consistent with the interests and values of choosers.

It had better be transparent rather than hidden. So no secret nudges, nothing that is covert. The word manipulation I think signals that people are being tricked, but something like a reminder by text message that if you don’t pay your telephone bill soon you’re going to face a late fee, or a reminder you have a doctor’s appointment next week, that’s not manipulative. That’s not exploiting weakness or tricking you.

So, we would have to go one by one. And I think in terms of what democratic governments have done, the nudges have been subject to public scrutiny. There’s something called My Plate, which is something that’s a plate that’s half fruit and vegetables and basically is designed to help promote healthy eating. You can say, “I don’t want that. I want it to be all meat or all potatoes.” You’re allowed to do that. It’s hard to see that as manipulative or covert.

So long as there’s transparency, so long as no right is being violated, so long as there’s public scrutiny, the risks I think are relatively low.

For private sector nudging, you’re making a great point, where you can have a company whose self-interest is more eyeballs or more sales. And if it’s using, let’s say, behavioral techniques to promote that, we might be worried that it’s crossing the line that separates maybe a fair market behavior and deception. Manipulation is probably closer to deception than fair market behavior. That’s something that the Federal Trade Commission and the ordinary consumers should both worry about.

When it is something like Facebook, where they are just changing the algorithm, I mean, you chose to be on Facebook, you know that they’re doing it on certain levels and you obviously clicked all the little buttons that said they were allowed to collect data on you. How do we think about fighting back against this? Because I think it’s increasingly clear to us as a country that that’s dangerous.

I think Mark Zuckerberg, and many people were surprised by this, called for federal government regulation of social media. You don’t see a lot of people calling for government regulation of themselves. One thing that is in his text is that the private sector here has so much power that to expect them to do what needs to be done — I think he’s acknowledging, “Maybe we can’t.”

So, to have a demand for a privacy-protective regulation is completely fair. To demand transparency, which might be so that consumers don’t get 12 incomprehensible pages but clarity. Maybe to have default rules where automatically your privacy is protected unless you relinquish it with a clear and transparent statement. And also to make sure that something like the newsfeed where you can be algorithmed into — I think algorithmed needs to be a verb — you can be algorithmed into an echo chamber where you’re just seeing louder and louder and maybe uglier versions of what you thought, to at least have transparency about what the newsfeed is doing and why, and to have a mandate — not that the Washington Post has to be there or the New York Times, that would be a free speech violation — but mandates such that people have clarity on what’s coming in their newsfeed and why. And maybe options for redoing your newsfeed with simple, usable strategies. That’s certainly a thinkable idea.

One way we’re at a threshold is that the large TV networks of decades past needed some sort of regulatory structure, partly because it was not manageable otherwise. Now you don’t have the limited spectrum problem for social media, but you have something which is closely analogous, a growth in power and the coming in of self-regulation. So this is coming, and Zuckerberg is getting ahead of it and applause to him for that.

Yeah, it’s one of those cases where you realize regulation is just about leveling the playing field.

It can be. Certainly for highway safety, where the question might be how do we have regulation such that we can use the highway without killing each other? Or getting cars so that if you have a car that’s really small and weak, you have a little crunch with a car that’s big and strong, and then you die. So a lot of what the regulation does is it fortifies cars such that we can coordinate with each other, and if things go wrong the likelihood that someone’s gonna die is lower.

On the subject of change, there have been a number of good changes that you write about that have happened. The MeToo movement, the gay rights movement, health and safety and all these other things. What do you see right now that might be on the verge of tipping into a real social change moment?

I’m going to answer, but I’m going to explain why I’m going to answer cautiously. One thing I think we’ve learned from the last 150 years is that change is often extremely unpredictable for two reasons. First, we don’t know what is inside people’s heads. Even Google doesn’t know. Google knows more, but it doesn’t know what’s inside people’s heads. And second, a lot of successful change depends on people interacting with each other at the right time and in the right way, and that’s very hard to foresee.

Who would know in advance, for example, that Taylor Swift would bring a lawsuit for unwanted touching? Even if you knew that Taylor Swift would object to that, that lawsuit was not expected.

Having said that, there are two things and I’m gonna play it safe with one and then I’m gonna say something a little riskier with another.

Where to play it safe is that there are a lot of people that are concerned about both economic deprivation and economic spreads, who have been, even under President Obama, relatively quiet about that. President Obama in my view did some great things, but many people reasonably think a lot more needs to be done in a wealthy country to help the economic distress of the people at the bottom and the economic challenges faced by people who, if not at the bottom, find every day really tough.

And on the Democratic side there’s been more noise about that than in recent memory. That’s tapping into a widespread voice in people’s heads that they haven’t themselves given any airtime to. So, that’s probably going to get louder and louder. We might see a surge of movement against economic inequality and deprivation of the sort we haven’t seen in a long time. I think I’m not taking a big risk there.

I’m going to take a risk with another one, which is animal welfare. There are a number of people who are greatly concerned about mistreatment of cats and dogs and horses, and even of animals raised for food. This is in some ways related to the climate change problem, but I’m trying to separate it from that, where people think to say, “I care about animal welfare” is a little bit to marginalize myself. But there’s that voice there, partly because people love their cat or love their dog, and the fact that they love their cat or dog means that they’re open to think about other living creatures, who are no less capable of pain than human beings are, and which are subject to unnecessary cruelty in many cases.

==

https://www.utne.com/politics/political-prison-ze0z1609zfol

New Age Politics: Our Only Real Alternative :{(Lorian Press, 2015) by Mark Satin captures the transformational political perspective emerging out of the social movements of our time. Originally published in the 1970s the ideas have been streamlined and are now more relevant than ever. This excerpt comes from chapter 2, "The Six-Sided Prison."

}:

To find more books that pique our interest, visit the Utne Reader Bookshelf.

The New Age position suggests that the basic problem has partly to do with the scale of our society: the human scale is beautiful and nearly everything we have now is much too big (and powerful and domineering). And that has little to do with capitalism per se: the Soviet Union’s ridiculous supersonic transport aircraft (“SST”) is even bigger than ours would have been.

But even more, the New Age position suggests that the problem is with “the people” themselves: with us; with what we have become.

And it holds that “what we have become” goes back to a cultural complex whose six main elements predate capitalism by hundreds or even thousands of years – and are all still present, in greater or lesser degree, in the socialist countries as well.

The elements are: patriarchal attitudes, egocentricity, scientific single vision, the bureaucratic mentality, nationalism, and the big-city outlook.

....

==

https://www.alternet.org/2019/02/campaign-end-on-election-day-movements-dont/

hightower

Campaigns end on Election Day. Movements don’t. Voting day is a time stamp for measuring our progress, and when the polls closed last Nov. 6, it was clear that the intensive organizing by grassroots groups throughout 2017-18 had paid off. But let’s not forget that it’s all the days in between elections that matter on Election Day. We’re like the farmers and gardeners who do grub hoe work through the summer for a good harvest in the fall. Let’s look at what we’ve learned.

Most political opinion writers assert that, with 2018 in the rear-view mirror, it’s time to focus our full attention on 2020’s supercalifragilisticexpialidocious presidential campaign. Given the exigencies posed by a deranged Trump, that’s an understandable instinct, but it’s wrong — at least for those of us who want to build a durable progressive movement with the public support needed to extend democratic government throughout America. For us, 2019 is the time to focus on … 2019! Already, thousands of races for mayor, county office, school board, legislature and more are gearing up.

Seeing them as inconsequential to big-picture politics, many Establishment beings scoff at these “lesser offices,” which are actually key to movement politics. They:

Indeed, these races are the essence of percolate-up politics: Build the farm team and presidents will follow. Even more important: Genuinely progressive policies will follow.

November tells us which offices we won, but January started the clock on what we actually gained. After all, the movement’s goal is not just to elect good people, but to enact good public policy. From my eight-year experience as Texas agriculture commissioner (elected 1982 and again in 1986), I can attest that the second goal does not necessarily follow the first. One major pledge of my campaign, for example, was to reduce pesticide poisoning of people and the environment and to promote organic production. Upon taking office, though, I was swarmed by chemical lobbyists, the Farm Bureau, powerful state officials, corporate media outlets and other intimidating forces of the agricultural poison complex, demanding that I “move to the middle of the road.” This furious onslaught was daunting, and my political resolve wobbled … until farmworker advocates and environmentalists confronted me. When a West Texas farmer friend scoffed, “Hell, Hightower, there’s nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos,” that perked me up. We rallied, pushed ahead, and achieved my campaign promise.

I see three distinct steps for getting good policies from officials who mean well but might back away under pressure. We, the movement, must:

1. Go inside with those we elect, providing aggressive public support, info, staffing and expertise to shore up the progressive agenda — that lobbyists and big donors will pressure our new officials to water down — and to expose the corporate powers trying to corrupt the people’s will.

2. Confrontour electeds when they drift, prodding them privately and publicly to be as bold as their promises.

3. Ride the momentum of our election victories to push — from inside and out — additional proposals for long-term structural changes to democratize America’s economic, social, and political systems.

You know your community and state. You know the people’s issues. You know your group’s talents and ingenuity. And you can see how progressive issues, candidates and movements are advancing! So this is no time to get sucked down into the swamp of Trumpism or surrender to bubbling right-wing fanaticism. Our task is to keep doing what brought us this far: organizing, harmonizing and mobilizing. Let’s keep at ’em!