I've been watching the thing go on in Wisconsin and Michigan and Florida etc.
I've come to some conclusions. While it is true that Scott Walker got what he wanted, at least for now, and the MI gov is getting what he wants, there has been a sea change in people's perspectives about which party does what.
I think that the young people getting involved, whether here or in Egypt has made all the difference. They have an enormous amount of energy, they are fun and funny. The older folks too have brought a great sense of humor to the table. And we are gonna need all of it - energy, fun, and funnies. And, the decision to stick it out as long as it takes has been crucial. Some of the things wrong with the time I went to protest the Iraq war - we did it on a Saturday. True, it helped people had the day off and the bus drove all night and we protested and then got back on the bus and drove all night back home - very convenient. Perhaps it was TOO convenient because it was ignored by the tradmed and ignored by the PTB. After all, they could. If we stuck around a bit (like the Vietnam war protest), it might have been different or like the rag tag folks trying to get attention during the depression setting up a camp.
Looking at objectives about any action done, there are several objectives:
1) Get the word out about the action and the objectives.
2) Influence public opinion.
3) Put enough and exact pressure to bear on officials to get changes in their actions.
4) #3 has a corollary. If you can push them into doing something stupid, that works too. Just no more Kent States, Okay?
5) The action has to have a coherent objective - one that is not so large that it becomes abstract and unwieldy, but rather an objective that fits into people's ideas of what needs to be done immediately.
The facebooking, twittering has accomplished a couple of things. Because it is character limited number 5 is easily met. And #1 is met even though the tradmed is bypassed.
#2 seems to need some actions for people to get involved. You cannot simply ask for money. People are not ATMs. Asking for pizza helps make it different, but still there has to be someway to enlist not just pocketbooks but feet on the ground. Everybody has a talent. As an oldie but goodie, I am not gonna run around, but man, it would be difficult to move me!
#3 is almost impossible. What can we do to governors when they have a billionaire backing them? Shame doesn't seem to impact them. Recalling them will take time and they think with the billionaires that the ad buys will pull them out of the soup. What would a pol hate more than anything? Having their power curtailed is one thought. But it takes money to instigate suits. People tried blocking the door of the assembly chambers and simply got hauled off.
#4 is easier, annoy them, piss them off, get them off balance, get them on record. Caveat - WE have to keep OUR cool.
In some cases, there might be an ability to do voter referendums. But that takes more knowledge than I have. The only way we can threaten them is with removing them from power and subjecting them to biting humor.
In every thing there are some side notes.
1) Solidarity requires that regardless of how we feel about another's beliefs, THEY ARE ENTITLED to their beliefs and should be congratulated for being alive enough to think of something as a belief.
2)Any time we are urged to hate somebody - think - am I being told they are going to get MY cookie? We've allowed ourselves to be peeled away from our allies - FDL, ACORN, MOVE ON, Professional Left, Pro Obama - and this has to stop. You don't have to marry them, just know that they are allies and go on. Of course now ACORN is gone and it fulfilled a vital role that is no longer being met. Chalk one up to the GOP for their grasping greedy talons holding on to power.
3)
“Music Can Make You Feel Like You’re Not Quite So Helpless:” Pete Seeger on People’s Music
We need music. We need musicians to chronicle where we are, immortalized in song how bastard like the villains in our drama are and inspire us for where we want to go.
4) If we are to write the history of this era, then we have to win. History is written by the winners as we can plainly see by the Texas textbooks.
5) By any measure, the occupation of the Madison Capitol Bldg was a great thing. It provided great visuals, history, and, judging by their reactions, annoyed the rethugs no end. Good job!
6) Back each other up. If one goes to jail, make that hundreds of folks to take to jail or make it hundreds that show up at the jail or court house inquiring about the person.
From Berkeley's history of protesting:
In September 1964 Mario Savio, the son of a Roman Catholic machinist proud of his son's commitment to social justice, returned to campus after teaching at a freedom school in McComb during that greatest of Mississippi summers. Savio discovered that the campus authorities had declared off limits for advocates of civil rights and other causes a stretch of Telegraph Avenue, the Bancroft strip, just outside the main gate to the Berkeley campus. For years the strip had been accepted as a place where students could hand out pamphlets, solicit names for petitions, and sign people up. But recently it had become identified with demonstrations against Berkeley and Oakland businesses that practiced discrimination. One of the demonstrators' chief targets was the Oakland Tribune, the East Bay newspaper published by William Knowland, the conservative United States Senator. The students' activities antagonized conservative university Regents and they pressured Berkeley to close the campus as a recruiting ground for activists and restrict student agitation in adjacent areas.
The ban set off a firestorm. Students who had taken on HUAC, Mississippi racists, Senator Knowland, and the East Bay business community were not about to be denied their rights by the likes of Clark Kerr. Groups representing SLATE members, anti-HUAC demonstrators, civil rights militants, and ordinary students, some of them conservative, protested the university's actions.
On September 29 the demonstrators defiantly set up tables on the Bancroft strip and refused to leave when told to do so. The next day university officials took the names of five protesters and ordered them to appear for disciplinary hearings that afternoon. Instead of five students, five hundred, led by Mario Savio, marched to Sproul Hall, the administration building, and demanded that they be punished too. Three leaders of the march were added to the list of offenders, and all eight were suspended.
The event that converted protest into rebellion occurred on October 1. As students arrived for classes that morning they were greeted by handbills declaring that if they allowed the administration to "pick us off one by one. . . , we have lost the fight for free speech at the University of California." Soon after, CORE, SNCC, the Du Bois Club, Students for a Democrat Society (SDS), and six or seven other groups set up solicitation tables in front of Sproul Hall, the administration building. At 11:00 A.M. the assistant dean of students went up to the CORE table and asked Jack Weinberg to identify himself. Weinberg refused, and the dean ordered campus police to arrest him. A veteran of the civil rights movement, Weinberg went limp in standard civil disobedience mode when the guards carried him to a waiting car. Bystanders and observers quickly came to his rescue. In minutes hundreds of protesters, singing the civil rights anthem, "We Shall Overcome," and chanting, "Let him go! Let him go!" surrounded the car, preventing it from leaving to cart Weinberg off to security headquarters.
For the next thirty-two hours Weinberg and his police escort remained captive in the car while speaker after speaker climbed atop the vehicle to address the growing crowd. Savio, here and later the most civil of militants, removed his shoes so as not to damage the police car. He compared the protesters to Henry David Thoreau, who had briefly defied the authorities to protest the Mexican War that would enlarge United States slave territory. He was followed by other speakers, who were pelted with eggs and lighted cigarettes by about one hundred fraternity brothers and athletes.
The standoff ended with an agreement between Kerr and the warring parties that submitted to a committee of faculty, students, and administrators all issues of campus political behavior and turned over to an academic senate committee the question of suspending the eight students. Weinberg would be released without charges.
From History of Berkeley Free Speech
7) Ask for more than we think we can get. The rethugs have taught us that we just might get it!
8) This war is never over. We cannot go back home and say "It is done." The Koch brothers and their descendants will rise up as soon as we do and start their sibilant seduction of the next group of pols.
But whatever we do we better do it damn fast. The GOP has figured out that all they need to do is pass laws and they have made us slaves legally.
Pete Seegar's Solidarity Forever