How to Save Obamacare

Dok Zoom at Wonkette:

Oh, dear Terrible Ones, you know this one: Organize. Speak up. If you’re currently in an exchange plan, make sure you and everyone you know signs up during the much-shortened open enrollment, November 1 to December 15. Call your representatives and tell them you won’t tolerate the president tearing down Obamacare from within. Organize more. Work to get Democrats elected and for fuckssakes stop refighting the 2016 primary. Try not to get too discouraged, and read Saint Molly Ivins if you need inspiration. Raise hell. Did we mention Organize? This is probably the biggest threat to America’s healthcare yet, and we can’t let it happen.

The Resistance: Step Away From the Recycling Bin and Pick Up Pitchforks

And stop wearing pink on Breast Cancer Awareness Day, brought to you by the very companies whose toxic chemicals actually cause breast cancer.

Erik Loomis at LGM:

When consumer movements stop caring about pesticide exposure once new chemicals are created that don’t persist on the vegetables but hit hard and fast and thus poison farmworkers, which was one of the stories I discussed in Out of Sight, that’s a neoliberal aim. When parents move to the suburbs or put their kids in private school to save their children instead of fighting for better public schools where they live, that’s also a neoliberal aim. All of these things–including the Alar campaign, third party campaigns, pointless boycotts to make yourself feel righteous and good, claiming you are the problem because you take long showers even though 90% of water use is from industry and agriculture–prioritize the individual as hyper consumer with the power to change the world through consumption instead of doing the hard work of organizing for change. At best, these campaigns have the power to make small changes if enough of them care, but none of this actually challenges the power structures of oppression. And thus they all reinforce the power of capitalism to set the agenda in our society, more so ever day as the state is seen as a negative and business glorified.

The Resistance: A Practical Guide

Organize, organize, organize.

 

TPM:

A group of former congressional staffers has a message for Democrats dismayed at Donald Trump’s election: act like the tea party.

In an online guide made public Wednesday night, a number of those onetime Hill staffers say that the best way for individuals to derail the policy agenda of Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) is to organize locally and badger their own congressional representatives to vote against individual pieces of legislation.

The guide argues that, like the “Tea Party patriots” who found common cause in their unified loathing of President Barack Obama, progressives who oppose Trump should stand against him before all else rather than try to articulate a policy agenda that has no hope of advancing while the GOP controls all three branches of government.

“We believe that the next four years depend on citizens across the country standing indivisible against the Trump agenda,” the authors write in the guide, which is formatted as a live Google document. “We believe that buying into false promises or accepting partial concessions will only further empower Trump to victimize our fellow citizens. We hope that this guide will provide those who share that belief useful tools to make Congress listen.”

Don't Mourn. Organize!

Now we get to work.

We do the door-to-door organizing that is the only thing that really wins elections.

We find candidates to fill every single office from school board up to members of Congress.  We fight for every single seat. The deadline for filing for the 2018 elections in Kentucky is January 30 of 2018.  Fourteen and a half months away.  We're already starting late.

And we remember who we are.  We're the non-white, non-male, non-freakazoid, non-straight majority.  We fucked up because for eight years we thought we couldn't lose. 

Now we have to go back to square one and start over.  One Democratic voter at a time.

We know what they think of us; now we're going to find out who they are.

We're not going to forgive.  We're not going to give in.  We're not going to give up.  We're going to fight.  Fight with the tools the Constitution gives us.  Because that's where our power is.

And we have to do it now, before they take even that away.

Guess Who Responded to Flint Water Crisis Months Before Anybody Else?

This is community action.  This is public service.  This is dedication.  This is simple humanity in the face of disaster.  This. Is. Planned Parenthood.

Think Progress:

The Planned Parenthood in Flint, in a modest brick building off a lonely stretch of highway, might not seem like an obvious first stop for a resident concerned about the strangely colored, bad smelling water that started coming out of taps in the city in early 2014.

But for those who work inside, tackling the issue of access to potable water was a no brainer once patients began voicing concerns. As a preventative health organization with deep roots in the local community, the conversation came naturally.

After hearing reports from their patients about chemicals in the water, the clinic sprang into action months before any state of emergency was declared, handing out water filters and teaching people how to use them.

“We’re more than just a reproductive health organization, we work for reproductive justice,” explained Christina Soliz, field organizer with Planned Parenthood of Mid and South Michigan. “Having access to clean, safe water is a reproductive justice issue. It affects your health. Families deserve better than this.”

“It fits right in,” agreed Sabrina Boston, the health center manager. Water is “a basic human right.”

SNIP

As the crisis continues to unfold — residents are still being tested for lead exposure, and the effects might not show up for years — Planned Parenthood will continue to focus on educating patients. But years of political attacks and austerity have gutted the resources it has at its disposal. Conservatives’ fixation on its abortion services has turned the organization into a political football. Presidential candidate Ted Cruz, who led the charge in the Senate to shut down the government over Planned Parenthood’s funding, launched his campaign’s water distribution efforts at Flint’s crisis pregnancy centers, which seek to divert women from Planned Parenthood with misleading or outright false information.

Michigan funding for pregnancy prevention — some of which goes to Planned Parenthood — has dropped from more than $7 million in 2001 to just a bit over $600,000 as of 2012, with the most dramatic cut in 2009 when it was reduced by more than 75 percent. The cuts came as Planned Parenthood has been specifically targeted by Michigan lawmakers: last year, the state House passed a bill banning the organization from receiving state funding, even though it doesn’t allocate any dollars to Planned Parenthood as it is.

“We’re seeing the effects of [austerity measures] in a lot of different places,” Tunde Olaniran, outreach manager, said. “In Flint, there was a drastic cut and we’re trying to slowly rebuild.”

SNIP

“People who walk in the door — they’re people, so we wanted to address something that was a huge issue,” Olaniran said. “We’re trying to make sure we care about the entire lives of people who come into our doors.”

True Story of the Bluegrass Pipeline Premiering at the Kentucky This Thursday

I saw the preview and it is wonderful. If you are not moved after watching it to take action for justice yourself, at the very least you will learn why it is a bad idea to get on the wrong side of nuns.

​

Please spread the word!

You can invite your friends on facebook at https://www.facebook.com/events/1640998036148861/

DVDs will be available at the screening, and can be ordered online at www.selluswilder.com/dvd.

Stop Letting the Warmongering, Billionaire-Cock-Sucking, Freakazoid, Conservatard Haters Win

Few people spent more time and pixels than me criticizing Alison Lundergan Grimes as a DINO, repug, conservative not Democratic enough to attract Democratic voters.

But you know what?  I voted for her (gag, puke.) Because yes, she really would have been slightly less bad than Mitch.

David Atkins at Political Animal:

An adviser to Rahm Emmanuel demonstrates his disdain for the Democratic base:

Unless they get the crazy lefty money machine going nationally, it’s not going to matter that there’s a resurgent left,” said an adviser to Mr. Emanuel who did not want to speak publicly about strategy. “The liberals at Heartland Cafe in Rogers Park can think great thoughts and read poetry for Chuy, but nothing else will happen.”

This is why liberals who refuse to participate in politics and vote consistently are one of the biggest impediments to creating change. The angry conservative base doesn’t just have good funding from billionaires. That helps, but only to amplify their message. The angry conservative base votes.

Conservative politicians know that they can count on their base to turn out to the polls and elect their people. That’s how the Eric Cantors of the world fall.

Too many progressives, on the other hand, see an imperfect Democratic Party and decide that politics is for the birds—as if there were some other alternative that will fix the system. There isn’t. Major changes won’t take place until and unless enough politicians fear the retribution of progressive voters at the ballot box.

So Rahm’s arrogantly smug adviser is right. It won’t matter, not because there aren’t enough progressives, but because not enough of them vote—and far fewer still engage in the tough work of dragging likeminded others out to the polls as well.

There’s no substitute for it. Not angry posts on social media, or marches in the street. It’s the votes that really count.

It's not just voting, either.  Ed Kilgore on electoral organizing.:

I wrote earlier today that the powers that be won’t listen to popular will unless the people actually come out to vote. As long as younger progressives sit on the sidelines, the country will be dominated by the will of plutocrats and the reliable conservative voters who align with them.

Meteor Blades at Daily Kos wrote a fantastic corollary to that today as well, urging the necessity of getting involved in electoral organizing at the precinct level:

To repeat, there is no silver bullet. Precinct organizing by itself won’t win elections. But in too many places we are without it, or the organizing is ineptly done or given no encouragement or assistance from the local or state party. The resulting election outcomes are awful. Consequently, so are the policy outcomes. …

It takes time people could be doing something else. Time they could be spending with family or reading a book or tending a garden. Time, energy, and the ability to take rejection with a smile and defeats with renewed determination. Not everybody has the psychological makeup to make door-to-door political visits. But even the shyest person can contribute to precinct organizing by doing other needed tasks.

If your area already has an active Democratic organization at the precinct level, join it. If it has one but the leaders are lazy or incompetent, figure how to boot them out and replace them. If there is no organization at all, get one going. The payoff may be in the next election or a decade from now. But it’s a crucial aspect of a progressive future.

I would add that local Democratic clubs and central committees are crucial in this regard, and are often the closest available vehicle for this type of organizing. Many or most not only don’t conduct year-round electoral organizing, but barely even phonebank or canvass for elections. Not coincidentally, most are in desperate need of younger and more diverse membership.

I myself got involved when I moved to Ventura County first by founding the county’s Young Democrats club, then moved on to become Vice Chair and then Chair of the county’s Democratic Central Committee—helping along with my allies in making a large number of reforms along the way to dramatically increase volunteerism, new voter registration and progressive influence on endorsements, resolutions and elections. Those efforts had a significant impact on helping to win local races, and ultimately to help elect Democrats to Congress and the statehouse in a difficult purple district. (I’ve since moved to Santa Barbara County where I now serve the central committee as we approach an exciting season of contested primaries.)

That work isn’t sexy. It doesn’t have the instant gratification of a tweet or a blog post. But it really matters. There’s no substitute for the hard, grinding work of finding and supporting great progressives for local office who will serve as better candidates in the supply chain for the statehouse and in turn for Congress. There’s no substitute for convincing voters, one at a time, that their vote really does count and that they, too, can have a real impact in making our country a more progressive place.

But all of us who are angry about the direction of our country all got involved, each of us county by county all across America, we could easily deny Republicans the White House and the Senate at least, and then soon the House as well pending the 2020 census.

It’s doable. We just have to do the work.

Organize, Stand Up, Fight, Win

The working class in this country - and fact it: if you're not filthy rich, you're working class - never got a damn thing we didn't fight for.

 

The great part is that when we finally do fight, we win.

 

Gabriel Thompson at The Nation:

Like many students at San Jose State, Castro came from a household where low wages weren’t an abstract injustice. Her parents had labored in California’s fields, and Castro was putting in long hours at an after-school program to help pay for college. At work she kept seeing kids swipe extra snacks because food was running low at home. “Their parents were working nonstop but only making the minimum wage,” she tells me.

Castro knew that San Francisco had raised its minimum wage in 2003 and saw no reason San Jose couldn’t do the same. She pitched the idea, and two other students joined her group, mapping out a plan.

Professor Scott Myers-Lipton, who teaches the Social Action course, estimates that 80 percent of his students work at least thirty hours a week. “I’ve been struggling with paying rent and bills for years now,” says Leila McCabe, a student who joined Castro’s group and eventually became an organizer with the Campus Alliance for Economic Justice. “Something’s wrong when you work hard but can’t make a real living.” This is a common complaint in San Jose, home to Adobe, Cisco Systems and eBay, and recently named the sixth-most-expensive city in the country, with rents increasing at a faster pace than in any other metropolitan area.

Although the students were dead serious, their efforts flew under the radar at the beginning. “As college students, we were able to find our way around a really confusing system,” McCabe tells me. “We weren’t looked at as being a powerful group. We went to all of these meetings, met with City Council members, but many people didn’t take us seriously. That was in our favor.”

SNIP
To qualify for the November ballot, the campaign needed to turn in nearly 20,000 signatures. In a five-week period, with help from the Labor Council, it collected 36,000. This spring, dozens of students gathered on campus at the statues of John Carlos and Tommie Smith, San Jose State alums who had raised their fists when accepting track and field medals at the 1968 Olympics. The students took off their shoes—Carlos and Smith had done the same to protest poverty—and marched barefoot to City Hall to hand over the signatures.

SNIP
Down the home stretch, the Labor Council provided many of the foot soldiers to push the message home, knocking on 80,000 doors and making more than 200,000 phone calls. Also important was the simplicity of the message. “Don’t get into long arguments about statistics,” a trainer told precinct walkers the Sunday before election week. “Keep it simple: if you work hard you deserve a fair wage, and eight dollars isn’t enough.” There are detailed studies showing that increases in the minimum wage don’t cause job loss, but the campaign wouldn’t get bogged down in a complicated fight over data. The strategy worked beautifully: despite being outspent, the coalition crushed the opposition with its message of economic fairness.

On November 6, the movement that began with three students brainstorming in a classroom notched its victory. Nearly 59 percent of San Jose voters backed Measure D, which increases the minimum wage from $8 to $10 an hour (and, just as important, it will rise with the consumer price index). San Jose thus became the fifth city in the country—and the largest—to raise its minimum wage, boosting the earnings of tens of thousands of workers by $4,000 a year. 

They - the plutocrats - think we're stupid.  They think we're lazy. They think we're good for nothing but serfdom. Proving them wrong is easy. All we have to do is organize, stand up and fight.

Change Happens Between Elections

The late, great Molly Ivins counseled against gloating over electoral victories.  But she died in January 2007, before repugs went all  Stop the Ni**er all the time.

So I have spent the last five days gloating up a storm and I hope you have, too.

Because now the real work starts.

You think Tuesday did not change enough?  Well of course it didn't.  It's an election.  Elections don't change anything. Elections merely confirm the changes that have taken place since the last election.

Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money:

There is a clear path to change. Conservatives understand this. You take over the party structure. That’s what they did in the 1950s and 1960s when they were disgusted by the moderate Republicanism of Dwight Eisenhower, Earl Warren, and Nelson Rockefeller. They took over party structures and local offices and turned them into bastions of energized conservatism. Note that conservatives basically don’t run 3rd party campaigns. Libertarians might talk about doing this–but they almost all vote Republican in the end because they know that they are moving their agenda forward by doing so.

Any reading of history shows that change within the American political system does not come through third party campaigns. It comes through the hard work of organizing our communities to demand change. Eventually legal and political changes are necessary–but only after people are organized to demand them. Look at the major movements in the last century. The labor movement, African-American civil rights, the women’s movement, gay rights movement. Each of these movements spent decades (or a century) organizing for change. For each of them, there was a moment when it all came together and they could demand transformations of federal and state law, which for gay rights is happening right now.

SNIP

There’s a reason socialists and communists worked to reelect FDR in 1936 and 1940, even though they thought he was a sell-out to the capitalists. They knew he was the best hope they had to build the kind of society they wanted and that by running some kind of 3rd party, they would completely alienate the base of people they wanted to organize.

SNIP

To summarize:

1. Change happens outside the election cycles–elections are for institutionalizing the changes you have attempted to make in the past 4 years.

2. Every single U.S. president has blood on his hands. Voting in a presidential election is always a choice between two evils.

3. We need to think less about our own personal moral position in voting. It’s not about you. It’s about the community where you live. Even if you vote for Jill Stein, the blood of Pakistani babies killed in drone strikes is on your hands. You cannot wash off that blood without changing the system–something that 3rd parties have never done. You want clean hands–organize the American public around the issues you care about. It will take the rest of your life. That is the timeline of real change.

4. There actually are lessons from the past on these issues. There are lessons in how to organize. And there are lessons about what third parties do and do not do. When someone can tell me what value a third party has had to pushing the agenda to the left in the last 80 years, I’ll be real interested in hearing it.

5. We need a tougher and smarter left. The self-described left punditry and journalists in 2012 has been individualistic, holier than thou, disorganized, and narcissistic. The real story of the left this year is smart and tough–the Chicago Teachers Union. That’s how you demand and make change. Writing editorials obscuring the differences between Obama and Romney and encouraging well-meaning people to protest vote is worse than worthless–it’s mendacious and serves as a tool for conservatives to continue pushing this nation back to the Gilded Age.

Laura Flanders at The Nation

Let us learn from the Dreamers, the young immigrants who made themselves a force to be reckoned with this election. People lead; leaders follow. It could have been worse. People led us back from a brink last night, but it will require the irrepressible force of powerful, passionate social movements that believe in themselves as much as they believe any politician, if we are to force the ship of state off its conventional course, and if f we are to live up to the determination, bravery and smarts that voters showed this election.

Loomis again:

Importantly for progressives needing to learn some lessons about how change takes place in this country, many of these ballot measures show that grassroots organizing works. The gay rights movement and marijuana legalization are social movements creating unstoppable forces for change on the grassroots. They are organizing on the ground and then demanding and successfully creating social change. This is how you do it.

One more day to gloat.  Then get out there and organize.

Straight From the Radical's Mouth

From Gordonskene at Crooks and Liars:

The name Saul Alinsky rings few or no bells with most people these days, aside from near constant references by the likes of Gingrich and Beck to paint him as the personification of evil. As a figure in the social movements going back to the 1930's he was well known as probably one of the cornerstone figures in community organizing, whose ideas became the foundation for much of the 60's social movements in civil rights and protest to the Vietnam War. Affiliated with no political organizations and not having much use for mainstream political leaders, Alinsky sought to give power to people who had no power. He once said that Machiavelli's book The Prince was written as a blueprint for the Haves to hold on to power, while Alinsky wrote Rules For Radicals as a blueprint for the Have-nots on how to take it away.

At the time of this interview, in February 1970 for Harper's Magazine and their weekly radio program At Issue, Alinsky is interviewed on the occasion of the reissue of his 1946 book Reveille For Radicals and discusses where the radical movement has gone and where it's going.

So now you know when someone asks you who Saul Alinsky is.

That's why we're here.

I highly recommend the deeply misrepresented Alinsky classic Rules for Radicals. If nothing else, it will teach you that making fundamental change is hard, tedious, time-consuming, discouraging, long-term work and not for the faint of heart.