Organizing

I Let Go Of Being A Righteous Outside Organizer

June 8, 2014 Joe Solomon, www.medium.com Organize! Appalachia, Coal, Organizing

I want to share a story. And I should warn you: it’s full of hubris. I moved to West Virginia in December of 2012, thinking I could lead a blitz campaign to end the reign of mountaintop removal in the state. I spent a few months volunteering for local groups, like Coal River Mountain Watch, RAMPS, and so on, listening and learning, and trying to be of service — while looking for openings and seeing the need for an audacious all-out effort that would finally safeguard these mountains and her people. By the Summer of 2013, I thought I was ready to make my move. I wrote up a 7-page manifesto, which I have yet to share publicly, and mailed it (yes, snail-mailed it) to what I saw as some of the best organizers in the state (though not all). The manifesto was coupled with an invitation to join together for a visionary summit at the Southern Appalachian Labor School on August 17th 2013 — to brainstorm and possibly even launch a new campaign.

Los Angeles Resolution Opposing Obama’s TPP

June 8, 2014 The Orange Juice Blog, www.orangejuiceblog.com Organize! California, fast track, Organizing, TPP

Here’s John-Paul Leonard of The Progressive Press: In a story that has gone completely unreported in the media, the Los Angeles City Council has approved a resolution against the TPP. The Council made a very strong statement against the attempt to usurp city and citizen sovereignty by a secret and unconstitutional legislative procedure called “Fast Track.” Incredibly, under Fast Track Congress can’t even amend a law, clearly abolishing a basic right of the legislature. The arrogance and perfidy of the corporatists seems unbelievable, but we know how they are. Evidently, the Los Angeles Times did not deem it worthy of mention! To me it seems quite historic, like Los Angeles’ own contemporary version of the Declaration of Independence. The globalist corporate controlled media obviously don’t want any of that.

Should We Fight The System Or Be The Change?

June 5, 2014 Mark Engler and Paul Engler, www.wagingnonviolence.org Strategize! Nonviolence, Organizing, Strategy

It is an old question in social movements: Should we fight the system or “be the change we wish to see”? Should we push for transformation within existing institutions, or should we model in our own lives a different set of political relationships that might someday form the basis of a new society? Over the past 50 years — and arguably going back much further — social movements in the United States have incorporated elements of each approach, sometimes in harmonious ways and other times with significant tension between different groups of activists. In the recent past, a clash between “strategic” and “prefigurative” politics could be seen in the Occupy movement. While some participants pushed for concrete political reforms — greater regulation of Wall Street, bans on corporate money in politics, a tax on millionaires, or elimination of debt for students and underwater homeowners — other occupiers focused on the encampments themselves. They saw the liberated spaces in Zuccotti Park and beyond — with their open general assemblies and communities of mutual support — as the movement’s most important contribution to social change. These spaces, they believed, had the power foreshadow, or “prefigure,” a more radical and participatory democracy.

Oakland Dials Down Mass Surveillance Plans

June 3, 2014 Matthew Heller, www.mintpressnews.com Resist! Oakland, Organizing, Privacy, Surveillance

Less than a year ago, the city of Oakland, Calif., took what privacy activists considered to be a major step toward a surveillance state. In July 2013, the Oakland City Council unanimously approved the implementation of the Domain Awareness Center, a surveillance hub that would combine public and private cameras and sensors from all over California’s eighth-largest city into one $11 million mass surveillance system. The components of the program would include integration of closed-circuit feeds from 700 cameras at Oakland public schools and 135 cameras at the Oakland Coliseum complex, which is home to the NFL’s Raiders and Major League Baseball’s Athletics. The video and data flowing into the system would be analyzed with license plate recognition software, thermal imaging and body movement recognition software, possibly even with facial recognition software.

Toward Total Paralysis Of Unequal Society

June 3, 2014 Paul Buchheit, www.commondreams.org Educate! Inequality, oligarchy, Organizing

The severing of our society into a plutocracy and a peasantry is so far along that statistics almost cease to have meaning. But the facts have to be told, to help explain the sickening sense that we're becoming a nation without a middle class, paralyzed by the inequality deniers and excuse makers who refuse to admit there's something wrong with their free-market capitalist system. The extremes are becoming almost intolerable. 1. A Broken System of Compensation: The Combined Salaries of 350,000 Pre-School Teachers is Less Than That of Five Hedge Fund Managers Pre-school teaching may be our nation's most important job. Numerous studies show that with pre-school, all children achieve more and earn more through adulthood, with the most disadvantaged benefiting the most. Hedge fund managers, at the other extreme, are likely to bet on mortgages to fail or on food prices to rise. It's a frightening commentary on our value system that the total income of over a third of a million pre-school teachers is less than the combined income of just five big-money speculators.

We All Must Become Zapatistas

June 3, 2014 Chris Hedges, www.truthdig.com Strategize! Mexico, Organizing, Solidarity, Zapatistas

Subcomandante Marcos, the spokesman for the Zapatistas (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, or EZLN), has announced that his rebel persona no longer exists. He had gone from being a “spokesman to a distraction,” he said last week. His persona, he said, fed an easy and cheap media narrative. It turned a social revolution into a cartoon for the mass media. It allowed the commercial press and the outside world to ignore traditional community leaders and indigenous commanders and wrap a movement around a fictitious personality. His persona, he said, trivialized a movement. And so this persona is no more. “The entire system, but above all its media, plays the game of creating celebrities who it later destroys if they don’t yield to its designs,” Marcos declared. The Zapatistas form the most important resistance movement of the last two decades. They are a visible counterweight to the despoiling and rape of the planet and the subjugation of the poor by global capitalism. And they have repeatedly reinvented themselves—as Marcos has now done—to survive.

‘Revolutionary Movements’ Fear Of Money Helps Oligarchy

June 2, 2014 Carl Gibson, www.occupy.com Educate! Mass Movement, Money, oligarchy, Organizing

This is the second part in a two-part series looking at ways that social movements inadvertently help the oligarchy. Part 1 challenged the non-profit industrial complex for duplicating and fundraising off the work of revolutionary organizations. Part 2 challenges revolutionary movement culture for stoking an irrational fear of money and making our efforts impotent in the process. Ask yourself these three questions: Who has more money – us or them? Who is more organized – us or them? Who’s winning – us or them? If you aren’t independently wealthy, want to work full-time helping the real movement get concrete wins, and don’t want to work for the D.C. nonprofit-industrial complex, then you’re shit out of luck. And if you are one of the few truly revolutionary movement organizations doing important work with enough of a budget to hire a staff, your workers are likely underpaid, overworked and burned out. All of the blame for these situations can be laid at the feet of revolutionary activist culture that teaches people to be afraid of money, to never ask for it, and to never openly say you want it or need it. And because of our own counterproductive views about money, the oligarchy continues to kick our ass and run laps around us.

What’s The Best Way To Stop Extraction? Delay, Delay, Delay

May 30, 2014 Bryan Farrell, www.wagingnonviolence.org Strategize! Environment, Extraction, Mining, Organizing

The knock on environmental protests is that they oftentimes only appear to delay the inevitable — be it forcing a coal-fired power plant to shut down for just one day or forcing the construction of a pipeline to be rerouted. But what if those delays really were more than symbolic victories? What if they amounted to something really powerful that actually imposed serious costs on industry? Well, that’s exactly what a new study says. According to researchers from the University of Queensland, Harvard Kennedy School and Clark University, conflict has become a major contributor to the cost of projects in the mining, oil and gas industries. The researchers looked at 50 planned major extractive projects and found that local communities launched some sort of “project blockade” in half of them, leading to 15 percent of the projects being suspended or abandoned. “There is a popular misconception that local communities are powerless in the face of large corporations and governments,” said Daniel Franks, Deputy Director of UQ’s Centre for Social Responsibility in Mining. “Our findings show that community mobilization can be very effective at raising the costs to companies.”

Pressure Mounts On Johns Hopkins To Pay A Living Wage

May 22, 2014 The Real News, www.therealnews.com Resist! Inequality, Labor, Minimum Wage, Organizing, Strike

JAISAL NOOR, TRNN PRODUCER: At the world-renowned Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore the starting wage is $10.71 an hour, and 1,400 employees--including some 15-year veterans--are paid less than $10.91. That qualifies a family of four for food stamps.That's why on Saturday, May 10, ahead of the expected resumption of contract negotiations, thousands rallied to demand the hospital pay more. HOPKINS WORKER: There is no reason for us at all to be getting food stamps, to not be able to have enough to take care of our children. There's no excuse for that. DANNY GLOVER, FILMMAKER: This is a call to action. This is a call to action. We are telling the administration at Johns Hopkins University/Hospital, to get into that tent with that negotiating room, to talk with these workers, to be there and support these workers. To these workers it's about building a community, a better community. NOOR: Two thousand healthcare workers represented by 1199 SEIU United Healthcare Workers East walked off the job for three days on April 9 to demand a $15 an hour base wage by 2015. Hopkins offered a five-year contract with a 2 percent raise. The Real News spoke to striking workers on the picket lines.

Post-Occupied

May 21, 2014 Sarah Jaffe, www.truth-out.org Educate! Occupy, Organizing

Occupy is a Rorschach; it has been since the beginning. To the question - "Where is Occupy now?" - one receives as many answers as there are activists, as many definitions of Occupy as there are offshoots across the country. It is, most will say, the wrong question. Occupy was a formative moment for the 21st century American left, and for young people growing up under austerity, unsure how to act politically on their debt and frustration. Occupy's 99% versus 1% sloganeering was a bracing retort to mealy-mouthed paeans to the "middle class." Yet Occupy did not happen in a vacuum, and any attempt to analyze it in one will fail. That original moment where Occupy felt huge and magical is gone and no one disputes that; its organizers have settled into longer-haul projects that often do, in fact, have measurable goals. "I remember, I wish[ed] I had more of an imagination, because it seemed like whatever idea we had in that space [in Zuccotti Park] we could make happen, and we did," says Mary Clinton, a labor organizer who helped plan Occupy Wall Street. "After the eviction, where did we go? We went back to workplaces; we were in schools; we were in communities; we were in the streets; we were occupying homes, doing eviction defenses - workplace organizing, things that are arguably even more challenging to capital."

Fast-Food Worker Movement More Energized Than Ever

May 21, 2014 Alyssa Figueroa, www.alternet.org Resist! Fast Food, Labor, Minimum Wage, Organizing, Strike

“Walk out! We got your back! Walk out! We got your back!” shouted hundreds of fast-food workers and their supporters in a crammed McDonalds store. All eyes were on Marta, as she paced around behind the McDonalds counter trying to figure out if she could join her fellow workers on the other side. In unison, the workers continued to shout, “Walk out! We got your back!” News cameras flashed on Marta’s face, and organizers advised her over the counter about her rights. Marta walked over to consult her managers, sparking hope in the crowd that she just might do it. By this point, Maria, another McDonalds worker on duty, had already gathered her things in the back and walked directly out from behind the counter into a thundering crowd and several hugs, leaving the counter door behind her swinging enticingly. Marta continued to pace and talk to her managers, who shrugged at whatever she said. Then Marta disappeared. When she returned, her black purse was hanging on her shoulder and her sweater was draped over her arm. The crowd erupted —“¡Si se puede! ¡Si se puede!” (Yes, we can!) — as Marta pushed through the door without looking back. She clapped and danced as the crowd engulfed her with the chanting.

U.S. Insurer Class Action May Signal Wave Of Climate-Change Suits

May 20, 2014 Mica Rosenberg, www.af.reuters.com Resist! Climate Change, Insurance, Organizing

(Reuters) - A major insurance company is accusing dozens of localities in Illinois of failing to prepare for severe rains and flooding in lawsuits that are the first in what could be a wave of litigation over who should be liable for the possible costs of climate change. Farmers Insurance filed nine class actions last month against nearly 200 communities in the Chicago area. It is arguing that local governments should have known rising global temperatures would lead to heavier rains and did not do enough to fortify their sewers and stormwater drains. The legal debate may center on whether an uptick in natural disasters is foreseeable or an "act of God." The cases raise the question of how city governments should manage their budgets before costly emergencies occur. "We will see more and more cases," said Michael Gerrard, director of the Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School in New York. "No one is expected to plan for the 500-year storm, but if horrible events are happening with increasing frequency, that may shift the duties." Gerrard and other environmental law experts say the suits are the first of their kind. Lawyers for the localities will argue government immunity protects them from prosecution, said Daniel Jasica of the State's Attorney's Office in Lake County, which is named in the Illinois state court suit.

An Introduction To Nonviolence

May 20, 2014 Michael N. Nagler, www.opednews.com Strategize! Nonviolence, Organizing

The twentieth century left us a double legacy. On the one hand, it was a time of great cruelty and violence; on the other hand, and perhaps from that very crucible of violence, we saw manifestations of a new kind of power--or rather, new uses of an age--old power--that can lead humanity to a far better future. In the years since Mahatma Gandhi demonstrated the power of nonviolence to free India from colonial rule and Martin Luther King Jr. employed it to liberate people of color from some of their oppression in the United States, countless peoples around the world--from Manila to Moscow, Cape Town to Cairo, and in the Occupy movements worldwide--have had varying degrees of success using one or another aspect of nonviolence to loosen the bonds of exploitation and oppression. The practice of nonviolence touches on something fundamental about human nature, about who we wish to be as individuals or as a people. Gandhi stated simply, "Nonviolence is the law of our species."1 Dr. Vandana Shiva, a renowned leader of rural resistance in India, said in a recent lecture that if we do not adopt nonviolence we risk compromising our humanity. Likewise, Iraqi Kurdish activist Aram Jamal Sabir said that although nonviolence may be harder and may require greater sacrifice than violence, "at least you don't lose your humanity in the process."2

Jane Kleeb Vs. The Keystone Pipeline

May 20, 2014 Saul Elbein, www.nytimes.com Resist! Keystone XL, Nebraska, Organizing, Protest

Terry Van Housen had a question. What he wanted to know from the 30 or so other Nebraska farmers and ranchers gathered in February at the York Community Center was this: What do you do with 10,000 dead cows? That was the number of cattle Van Housen figured could be at risk if the Obama administration permitted the proposed 1,700-mile XL leg of the Keystone pipeline to cut across their state. Bulldozers would dig a trench not far from Van Housen’s feedlot, completing the final phase of the Keystone project and streamlining the current flow of oil from the bitumen mines of Northern Alberta toward refineries on the Gulf Coast of Texas. If the pipe were to leak, Van Housen said, his cattle could die. “Can we put [those cows] on trucks and send them to Canada?” suggested Max Nelson, a stooped retired rancher who raised his hand every 10 minutes to pose other hypothetical disasters: a spill polluting the water supply of West Omaha, say, or compromising the hydroelectric dams on the Platte River. TransCanada, the $48 billion Canadian company that owns the Keystone, has repeatedly said the XL will be “the safest pipeline ever built on U.S. soil,” a technological marvel with automatic shut-off valves and satellite monitoring.

Will The Next Labor Movement Come From The South?

May 18, 2014 Amy B. Dean, www.truth-out.org Organize! Labor, Organizing

Corporate America - especially in the American South - doesn't seem to know the proper way to treat a guest. Guest workers have long been one of the most easily exploited segments of the American workforce. Employers frequently take advantage of their legal vulnerabilities to ignore labor laws, pay subminimum wage and threaten them with physical abuse, all of which American citizens are better equipped to resist. Whole sectors of the American economy - especially agriculture - have long depended on this underground labor market and the ease with which employers can dominate it. But in recent years, guest workers have been bringing attention to their plight and winning some small victories. One of the leaders of that movement is Saket Soni, executive director of the National Guestworker Alliance and the New Orleans Workers' Center for Racial Justice. From his base in the Deep South, perhaps the United States' most worker-unfriendly region, he has helped organize workers across the Gulf Coast. In 2012, Soni worked with a group of guest workers at a crawfish processing plan named CJ's Seafood, where employees were locked in, forced to work nearly around the clock and threatened with violence when they protested.

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