Tag Archives: organizing

Political Rants

Putting power back in its place

Labor has been on the back foot for decades now. I am old enough to remember the Reagan turn – even the Carter and Nixon administrations, frankly. The serious move towards neoliberal economics got rolling under Carter, who was fond of deregulation and austerity. He also started a steady increase in military spending towards the end of his term – a trend that Reagan accelerated in the years that followed.

Those were not good years for workers. Firing the PATCO air traffic controllers was just a start. The union movement in the United States continued to lose ground throughout the 1980s and 1990s, when Clinton took the baton from Reagan/Bush and more fully implemented the vision of corporatism and a general attack on the rights of working people. There were a few glimmers of light in the darkness – the UPS strike in 1997, the anti globalization movement around the same time. But Thatcher’s contention that there was no alternative to capitalism continued to prevail. Until it didn’t.

Learning from teachers

We are now in the midst of a resurgence of labor organizing the likes of which we haven’t seen for decades. You could see evidence of it in some of the activism rooted in Occupy Wall Street, as well as the movement around Bernie Sanders’ campaigns. But what’s happening today is the product of a lot of hard work on the part of organizers across the country. One of the first and most dramatic examples of this was the start of the teacher’s strikes in 2018.

Now, I don’t think there are many professions in the United States that are more roundly abused than teachers. In most public school districts, they are given inadequate resources, paid poorly, and expected to compensate for all of society’s failings. When teachers rose up in 2018, including in districts that were not unionized, it put the neoliberals on notice. Even now, with the pitched attack against teaching children about race, sexual orientation, or anything salient in American history, teachers are still successfully challenging their bosses. There’s a lesson in that for all of us.

New economy, new tactics

Like many people, I first heard about Christian Smalls during the first months of COVID, when Amazon fired him for demanding that they take action to protect their workers. Over the almost two years that followed, he and his colleagues organized independently of any major unions and won. What they’ve done should serve as a blueprint for organizers across the country. That behemoth of a company drastically underestimated Smalls and his co-workers – not surprising. One of the oldest stories in the world.

Then there are the Starbucks workers. I heard some of these young people interviewed on Michael Moore’s Rumble podcast, and I was impressed not only with their energy and enthusiasm but by their deep understanding of the power relationship between workers and owners. This is more than inspiring, though. This movement is a promising sign of things to come, driven by a generation that has seen a lot of financial hardship over the last two decades.

Shake them upside-down

So what can we do? Support labor organizing in your area and nationwide, in whatever way you can. Push for a more favorable legal and regulatory environment in which people can exercise their fundamental rights as workers. And, last but not least, compel a reluctant Democratic party to change the tax laws so that billionaires cannot even exist. Call it the “shake them upside-down” law.

Finally … something to feel good about. Let’s build on it.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.

Political Rants

No shortcut.

There’s been a lot of push back from the left this week on the Biden Town Hall, and with good reason. While he presents as an affable old grandpa, his conception of policy is locked into the 1990s in a lot of ways. When he thinks he’s leaning to the left, he means the “left” of three decades ago – the liberal cohort that thinks in terms of community policing, mild reforms, drug rehabilitation programs, etc. Whereas even the mainstream Democratic party has moved on from many of these centrist notions of change, the leftward movement appears to have escaped the notice of President Biden. For the time being, he is riding on a wave of relief that Donald Trump is no longer (a) President, (b) in our faces every single day, or (c) on Twitter. I’m sure millions of people are happy that the current president is not ordering an angry racist mob into the Capitol building. But that, while necessary, is of course far from sufficient.

His position on student debt illustrates this insufficiency to a tee. Biden keeps confusing, probably deliberately, the temporary suspension of interest payments (which he has ordered) with elimination of interest on student debt (which he has not ordered). He vaguely promises $10K in debt relief, but both he and his spokesperson keep suggesting that this is something Congress should take up. To be clear, he has the authority to do this himself. And if he can do $10K, he can do more. But Biden seems to think that there’s a fairness issue involved here. He tends to couch it in terms of not wanting rich people to get the benefit, which brings us back to Biden’s (and most centrist Democrats’) preference for “targeted” programs. In other words, we need a new, overly complicated, dedicated administrative infrastructure to achieve the recapture of funds that our already-existing tax system could accomplish with very little adjustment.

Of course, this problem is more about us than it is about Biden. We’ve got Biden as president – and lackluster officeholders all the way down the line – because we didn’t organize enough people and ultimately bring them around to supporting progressive, even radical, change. In a very real sense, we get the politicians we deserve, and we shouldn’t expect better if we’re not doing the hard, long-term work of building change from below. Organizing is about more than electing people, obviously, but one of the by-products of successful organizing is a better grade of politician. I think we’ve seen that in some of the more progressive Congressional candidates, like Rashida Talib, Cory Bush, AOC, and others. I’m pleasantly surprised when candidates of their stripe are successful, largely because I know that in my own area of the country very little organizing is taking place – that’s why we now have the return of our erstwhile Republican Congressmember, Claudia Tenney, who beat out Anthony Brindisi by a mere 109 votes. Brindisi was part of the “problem-solver” conference and there were few Democratic members farther to the right, but in the end it wasn’t enough.

You see, a little more organizing would have given us those 110 votes to return a centrist to Congress. And a lot more organizing might have resulted in sending an actual progressive to Congress, to say nothing of actual mutual aid benefits for the people in our district. So, what are we waiting for?

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Berned.

It was a rainy Tuesday, and the revolution didn’t show up … again. Turns out revolutions are hard, even the electoral ones. As I said last week, these primaries are about proof of concept: if there’s a massive constituency for change, as Bernie Sanders has suggested, it should be mobilized enough to carry him into the presidency and to drive his agenda forward in the years that follow. There was no evidence of such a movement this week, and I don’t intend to denigrate the thousands of hard-working people who have powered Bernie’s campaign from the beginning – they have done remarkable work. But they are merely the vanguard – we need to hear from the masses. It is they who have the real power, and thus far they are not showing up.

Building a future, not just a campaign.

As someone who has been on the left all of my life, I am no stranger to political losses. Leftists tend not to be easily discouraged, and it’s a good thing. Make no mistake about the Sanders campaign – we are attempting to elevate to the presidency someone who has never taken part in the Nixon/Reagan conservative framing that has dominated our politics for decades. That is unprecedented in the modern era. It’s a heavy lift, and we should have no illusions about that. But as Bernie himself pointed out on Wednesday, his campaign represents majority positions within the Democratic party. It also reflects the priorities of a large majority of our young people – and by “young”, I mean 45 and younger. There is no question that that is where the party is going, not to some chewy center represented by people like Biden.

The fatal question for us as a society, though, is can we afford to wait another decade or more to see this new progressive majority emerge? I would say that the climate crisis has already answered that question. But I want to emphasize that the most important component of our response is in the organizing and the mobilization. Yes, Bernie Sanders is the only remaining candidate who, if elected president, would need little or no convincing to take on the enormous task of turning this fossil-fuel driven society around. But if we don’t achieve that maximal objective (and we should most definitely try to do so), we will still need the organizational institutions to push policy forward on whomever ends up in power next January. Short of Bernie, it would be better to have Biden than Trump; but either way we have to have mobilization. The Sanders campaign is like a progress indicator on the movement – the degree to which it succeeds is some rough indication of how well we’re doing on the ground. Yes, we’ve made progress over the past few years, but we have a long, long way to go.

My recommendation is simply this: don’t lose heart. We can still win this nomination. But even if we don’t, the effort is not wasted so long as we build on the foundation of this campaign.

luv u,

jp