"About 50,000 people attended the second Save the Dream event in Chicago. This is a dramatic increase over the 25,000 people who attended NACA's first two Save the Dream events last year in Columbia, SC, and Washington, DC.
"One of the reasons why turnout has increased this year is NACA's use of optimized press releases, blog outreach, and YouTube videos to let people know that the national non-profit community advocacy and homeownership organization offers unprecedented solutions for homeowners caught up in the current mortgage and economic crisis. During the Save the Dream events, borrowers can get mortgages restructured the same day."
If the Obama Administration is to survive the ongoing assault still building steam, it needs a grass roots action-oriented army like the one NACA is forming, We can't just rely on the Netroots activists who prefer emails to organizing. It can't rely on that co-opted in-house DNC arm, Organizing for America either. That is there only to rally support for the White House.
A new movement has to develop outside the Democratic party in the same way that the Right acts outside the GOP, and has built a capacity for independent action with echo chambers, message points and personalities. Their ideas may be backward but their dedication can't be denied.
We can defend Obama's ideals and also press for more action. As Jeff Cohen reminds us, we have a "president whose instinct is toward conciliation and splitting the difference with big business and the right wing. Sure, Obama was a community organizer once. That was decades ago when Russia was still our mortal enemy, Nelson Mandela was still an official State Department terrorist threat and the White House was still funding Islamist fanatics in Afghanistan. For the last dozen years Obama has been a politician -- and a consummate compromiser at that. Have we failed to notice?"
Can progressives fight the three front war that is needed---against the vicious right, against the slippery center, and for a more comprehensive and empowering agenda? Can they finally realize that all politics does not occur inside the beltway, and that being tethered to the denizens on the Hill can become a liability at a time when those political chameleons enjoy so little respect.
Will they ever realize that they have to get into the economic trenches and fight the power of the banks with groups like A New Way Forward? It is time to stop living inside our private worlds and on the internet, and start living in America,
Why is economic justice a priority for so few activists when these issues impact so many?
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