I am left off-balance by the contradictions.  Winds of change are blowing.  Creating a Facebook page for the Union of the Unemployed Thinktank was a wrenching experience.  It grew quickly to 183 members, and now it is pretty quiet.  Little leverage, and the main Union of the Unemployed acting director Rick Sloan can have a wonderful article in Huffington Post that mentions his position with the IAM but not a single peep about the Union of the Unemployed that he ostensibly heads.  I carry two things with me from the experience.  First, jobs CREATION, not jobs ENCOURAGEMENT, is what we have to be demanding at every point.  Second, I am a lot less patient with bullshit.  Perhaps that is a character flaw.  I am very far from being okay.

Oh yeah, I mention contradictions.  Winds of change.  Demonstrations for jobs are starting to pop up like springtime daisies.  New organizations are forming.  The Bull Moose Movement in New York.  An unemployed council in Oregon.  Bart Stupak and Blanche Lincoln are being challenged.  The emperor has no clothes, details at 11.  There is now a steady patter of “primary them all.”  Contradictions.  The Full Court Press is not benefiting from this.  That’s okay.  We are starting to see something like movement.

I’ve been unemployed since July 2008.  My tech job was outsourced to the Philippines.  The week before that, my wife had been forced out of her job in retaliation for having reported sexual harassment at one of Wall Street’s leading regulatory agencies.  I was intrigued when she showed me an article on AlterNet telling about a newly formed Union of the Unemployed formed by the IAM.  I joined online.

Then I set out trying to figure out what I had gotten myself into.  The union is organized into 6-person Cubes.  One could communicate to everyone within a Cube, but all other communication had to be done one-by-one from the membership links.  As for what the union was fighting for, the emphasis was on excoriating Jim Bunning for holding up unemployment extensions (which Democratic Party dallying made possible).  While there were references to IAM press releases supporting jobs creation, the actual agenda was to support the bill whose heart was giving tax breaks to small businesses so as to encourage them to create jobs (the lowest paying jobs).  There was no link for contacting the union.

An ordinary beautiful San Francisco day in 1979.  Home from work, flicked on the tube, the announcer droned that the jury had just convicted ex-cop Dan White of manslaughter for the carefully planned murders of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk.  People were gathering at the Civic Center.

I immediately hopped in my car and headed downtown, parking several safe blocks from the scene.  Thousands were gathered before the Civic Center steps, mostly silent in stunned vigil.  The prosecution had horribly botched a slam-dunk case.  Many thought deliberately botched.  A nervous line of cops surrounded the building, and 13 police cars were parked alongside the mall across the way.

Nothing happened.  The crowd swelled.  One man began tugging on a parking meter along the sidewalk.  Its moorings loosened, he kept rocking it until the meter came free.  He took the meter and smashed in the windshield of one of the cop cars, then ran for the cover of the crowd.  The crowd only watched.  The police only watched.

A few days ago, I ran across a fascinating post on FireDogLake by scrowder, called A failure to plan is a plan to fail – a challenge to the FDL website.

A failure to plan is a plan to fail. So said a poster here on a different diary today and it got me to thinking. What is the progressive plan for dealing with the Conservadems in Congress who’ve sold us out time and again since the Reagan years?

(crickets)  Yeah, that’s the problem. The debate always comes down to this: Vote Dem or let the Repugs rule. And that’s what happens. Dems lose their base in disgust and Repugs take over. I’m just as guilty. I’ve voted Nader every election until the chance to elect a black man president outweighed the knowledge that this guy was being foisted on us by the corporatocracy.

Instead of worrying about polls, or what the Dems should be doing or what Obama isn’t doing, we should be wholly focused on getting progressives past their primary challenges and replacing Conservadems on the ballot. But we aren’t.

The point — to underline scrowder — is on what WE are doing, not on what THEY aren’t doing for us.

On Saturday, I saw a very interesting piece by Cenk Uygur, whom I have admired, on FDL, “It’s Time for a Progressive Revolution,” in which he said:

If ever there was a time for primaries, it’s now!  Almost every Democrat running for re-election should get a primary challenge.  This is our best chance at a progressive revolution. You know who should run?  Teachers, farmers, dentists, moms, small business owners, cops, butchers, bakers and candlestick-makers.  And anyone else with a shred of integrity who actually cares about our democracy.

Normally, you need a boat load of cash to run against a member of Congress. Hence, you need special interests behind you. And hence, all of our members of Congress are sell-outs to special interests. Hence, only 8% of people want to re-elect them. But right now might be one of those moments in a democracy where the people stand up and roar. Right now, all you might need is to just not be an incumbent.

It was focused on the 2010 elections, while the Full Court Press is building for 2012 because of issues of resources and filing deadlines.  But I was piqued by his saying, “Almost every Democrat running for re-election should get a primary challenge,” and I loved the broad sentiment, “You know who should run?  Teachers, farmers, dentists, moms, small business owners, cops, butchers, bakers and candlestick-makers.  And anyone else with a shred of integrity …”  Seemed like there was the basis for some dialogue here.

So I posted the Full Court Press proposal on the Young Turks website.  I was immediately met in the comments field with a cascade of viciousness.  From KenTX:

I’m the REPUBLICAN who is kicking your ass, in your own liberal blogosphere.

We already control cable news, satellite radio, and the AM radio airwaves. Now we’re in your kitchen, cooking an omlet.

By the time 2012 gets here, there won’t be anything left of the Democrat Party…

Green, green, it’s green they say

On the far side of the hill

Green, green, I’m goin’ away

To where the grass is greener still

  — New Christy Minstrels

As some of you may know, I have not considered the Green Party a viable vehicle for independent politics.  I have argued that they are organizationally calcified, obsessed with programmatics, and would lack the flexibility to adapt to a strong 3rd-party upsurge.

At the same time, I’ve noticed a lot of people touting the Greens as our best independent vehicle, citing their having thoroughly progressive politics, a nationally-recognized organization in place, and ballot status in many states and I am moved by this.  I have put in many years with independent left politics, including:

     California Peace & Freedom Party

     Barry Commoner’s Citizens Party (Northern California executive board)

     Lenora Fulani’s New Alliance Party (I was their main typesetter)

     Ross Perot’s Reform Party (active in New Jersey branch’s bloody factions)

But I have never seen as much broad 3rd-party sentiment as I am seeing now.  Not even close.  Politically chaotic, from teabaggers (whatever their leaders may tout), to commie radicals to pissed-off liberals to Golden-Mean moderates, but never as much part of the mainstream discourse.  Geez, I remember the days when 3rd party votes weren’t even counted.

So in these circumstances, I am reconsidering my position on the Greens.  It may be the case that the Greens or elements of the Greens will be more responsive to an independent upsurge than to maintaining their own organizational status quo.

In NightProwlKitty’s essay Ground, Heather writes:

My immediate thought and what i got from that diary was that even if a person had only small opportunities to have an impact on the revenue stream like canceling the cable, but that move was part of a whole big movement under ONE umbrella framed as a general strike, which also absorbed the people making the big moves, and the people already impacted severely by the way things are, then there would be some eyes popping open.

Wikipedia:

A general strike is a strike action by a critical mass of the labour force in a city, region, or country. While a general strike can be for political goals, economic goals, or both, it tends to gain its momentum from the ideological or class sympathies of the participants. It is also characterized by participation of workers in a multitude of workplaces, and tends to involve entire communities. The general strike has waxed and waned in popularity since the mid-19th century, and has characterized many historically important strikes.

… The classic general strike, by contrast, involves also workers (and members of the working-class) who have no direct stake in the outcome of the strike. For example, in the San Francisco General Strike of 1934, both union and non-union workers struck for four days to protest the police and employers’ tactics that had killed two picketers and in support of the longshoremen’s and seamen’s demands …

Some in the labour movement hope to mount a “peaceful revolution” by organizing enough strikers to completely paralyse the state and corporate apparatus. With this goal achieved, the workers would be able to re-organize society along radically different lines.

Since we are political people, I think it most helpful to go with the syndicalist use Wikipedia quoted in the paragraph directly above.

the following is part 1 of a 2-part diary pulling together some thoughts I’ve gathered from dialoguing on DocuDharma.  I plan to publish part 2 tomorrow (Saturday).

If you wish to read it in its entirety now, it can be found on the Antemedius site.

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,

But in ourselves, that we are underlings.” — Shakespeare

The overall state of dialogue on the left is incredibly banal.  It is narrow.  It is ahistorical.

Our current condition comes at the tail-end of a long deterioration.  At its best, left politics at the beginning of the 60s was alive and dynamic and creative.  At its worst, left politics by the end of the 60s had the character of the war of all against all.  The life of organizations was nasty, brutish and short.  While the tide of the movement had been rising, everyone had new blood to proselytize, recruit, mobilize, even as they excoriated each other as sellouts, petit-bourgeois deviationists and running dog lackeys.  Advocates of more radical action were successful, an active movement validated them — or bailed them out as the case might be.