Why should we Depend on Obama's campaign team to Beat the right wing machine?
Why should we depend upon the proven-to-be-spineless democratic congress or Democratic party to protect our rights. There are millions of motivated, smart progressives who have the ability to make a lot more things happen than we're currently seeing happen.
We need to join forces, but not in the old ways. We must tap the power of the web-- the bottom up cooperation, power of our diversity and the economies the web enables us to achieve to come together for projects that tap the potential power we possess but have not yet wielded. There's a new book out, Crowdsourcing , by Jeff Howe, which describes how thousands or millions of people coming together have revolutionized the way things get done-- wikipedia, bird migration exploration, mapping of craters on mars-- yes, even NASA is using this approach. We need to use this on-line collaboration to come up with ideas and plans and then implement them.
We've had enough, depending upon the Obama team or the Democrats or the Greens or Nader or Mike Gravel or Ron Paul has not worked. America is under attack. It has been under attack by extremists for eight years. If they win the next election, if they gain ground in congress, then the US, Democracy, the rights of humanity are at great risk. It's time we bypass the old ways of getting things done.
Maybe it will take boycotts. Maybe it will take the kinds of civil actions reverend Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks. Maybe we'll need to overwhelm phone services.
A few things are for sure. We have to act quickly and we can't let turf issues between different progressive orgs keep it from happening.
How do we get started? We need to build coalitions-- at the regional, state and national level. We need to coordinate and communicate. I'm going to build a website where such coalitions can come together and communicate. It should be up by next week. Meanwhile, what are your ideas? And if your answer is "make phone calls and canvas for Obama," you belong on Dailykos or some other site that is run to support Democrats.
Progressives have been repeatedly used, abused, betrayed, lied to and let down by Democrats who take them for granted. It's time to take action as progressives. Where shared interests overlap with Democrats or Greens or others, great, otherwise, we need to take care of our own progressive values and advocacy issues. The Democrats sure have not done so.
What are your ideas? You don't have to have the full idea. There are plenty of others to flesh out even the hint of a concept that has some potency and potential.
If you or your org is part of a progressive coalition, anywhere, please talk about it in a comment-- status, activity, number of members, number of orgs, number of people on combined email list.
There are tens of thousands of peace, justice and ecological justice orgs in the US. If we join together, there is SO much we can do that we have not tackled or had the resources to do separately. Let's get smarter, collectively, and make things happen.
