Pax Americana

198 More Sundays: A Day Without Insurance Employees

I'm going to stick with economic noncooperation this week since I think that's an integral part of an intervention strategy to force Congress to pass real reform, as I outlined the other day.  I've generally thought that a combination of boycotts and strikes were the real key to success, hindering our corporate overlords' ability to function.  This general tactic has been employed in a variety of struggles, including for marriage equality, Indian independence and even resistance campaigns against the Nazis.

Today's gonna be a three-fer because I'm not entirely sure if there is a single form to use.  As Sharp observed:

The broad categories which must be used in classifying the many methods of nonviolent action are too rigid to suit the reality...Consequently, in every general class and subclass--such as the strike--there are some methods which also have one or more characteristics of another class (or do so under certain conditions) or which differ in at least one respect from the general characteristics of this class.

This is especially true in the case of the strike.  Normally, the strike is a temporary withdrawal of labor, but there are methods in which the withdrawal is, or at least intended to be, permanent.  Also, some methods are combinations of boycotts and strikes.  Other methods operate by withdrawing labor but do so only symbolically, so that they might also be included within the class of nonviolent protest and persuasion.

I have in mind some application of examples from three subclasses: Restricted Strikes, Multi-Industry Strikes, and Combination of Strikes and Economic Closures.  First, Method 112. Reporting "sick" (sick-in).  This is a form of restricted strike (i.e., not a total or general work stoppage):

Where strikes are prohibited by law, decree, or contract, or are not feasible for other reasons, workers may achieve anything from a slowdown of production to the equivalent of a full strike by falsely claiming to be sick.  This is an especially useful method when sick leave has been granted in the contract or law but strikes have been prohibited.

A great deal of feigned illness was reported among African slaves in the southern United States, sufficient to have had considerable economic impact.  Sometimes the illness ratio was nearly one sick to seven well.  Slaves were frequently sick on Saturday but rarely on Sunday, which was not a normal workday; more sickness occurred when the most work was required.

Although there was a great deal of genuine illness among the slave population, it is also clear that much of it was feigned in order to get out of work, to avoid being sold to an undesirable master, or to get revenge on a master (by feigning a disability while on the auction block and hence fetch a lower price).  Women pretending pregnancy received lighter work and increased food.  The Bauers write:

Of the extent to which illness was feigned there can...be little doubt.  Some of the feigning was quite obvious, and one might wonder why such flagrant abuses were tolerated.  The important thing to remember is that a slave was an important economic investment.  Most slave owners sooner or later found out that it was more profitable to give the slave the benefit of the doubt.  A sick slave driven to work might very well die.

One population that would be very good to have join in our efforts is employees of the health insurance carriers themselves.  Of course a full-blown strike in, say...billing or customer service likely is problematic for a number of reasons, but what if they used sick-ins, perhaps in the form of a "rolling" strike, to create work slowdowns in conjunction with stoppages in other tangential industries? 

Of course I wouldn't limit this form to just insurance workers.  An epidemic of HR676 Flu could have great impact on any industry, and the government.

We might also try a tactic used quite frequently and successfully outside the United states: 117. General strike (multi-industry strikes):

The general strike is a widespread stoppage of labor by workers in an attempt to bring the economic life of a given area to a more or less complete standstill in order to achieve certain desired objectives.  The method may be used on a local, regional, national or international level.  Wilfred Harris Crook defined the general strike as "the strike of a majority of the workers in the more important industries of any one locality or region."
...
While a general strike is usually intended to be total, certain vital services may be allowed to operate, especially those necessary for health...Crook distinguishes three broad types of general strike--political, economic and revolutionary.

A political general strike has the goal of achieving specific concessions from the government.  One great historical example is the series of strikes in 1893, 1902 and 1913 in support of electoral reforms in Belgium--actually, Belgians seem to love this Method for lots of goals.

Belgium has a long tradition of mass industrial strikes. In 1886 a great series of strikes broke out first in the neighbourhood of Charleroi, then in Liége and over a large part of the Walloon provinces. The main demand was universal suffrage; but there were economic demands as well in some places.

Then in May, 1891, a mass strike of some 125,000 workers put forward a demand for changes in the electoral system. In April, 1893. another strike, embracing about a quarter of a million workers, broke out around a similar demand. The outcome was a universal, but unequal, franchise, the votes of the rich and “cultured” counting for two or three times those of workers. Dissatisfied, the workers called another mass strike nine years later, demanding a complete revision of the Constitution.

An even bigger strike – in which 450,000 workers took part – was called by the Socialist Party and trade unions to achieve electoral reform in 1902, and again in 1913.

Another general strike, which wrested a forty-hour week and paid holidays from the capitalists, took place in 1936. In 1950 a general strike led to the abdication of King Leopold.

In 1958-9 the coal-miners of the Borinage spontaneously began a general strike not merely for wage demands but for the nationalisation of the mining industry.

Our reformist tradition in the United States also includes general strikes, usually in support of labor, such as the Seattle General Strike, the San Francisco General Strike and Textile General Strike.  It wouldn't be much of a stretch for Americans to use such tactics to achieve other forms of social change like universal healthcare.

The final strike Method I've been musing about is 118. Hartal (combination of strike/economic closure).

The hartal is an Indian method of nonviolent action in which the economic life of an area is temporarily suspended on a voluntary basis in order to demonstrate extreme dissatisfaction with some event, policy, or condition.  It is not used to wield economic influence, but to communicate sorrow, determination, revulsion, or moral or religious feelings about the matter in question.  Although the form of this method is largely economic, the effect is one of symbolic protest.

The hartal is usually limited to a duration of twenty-four hours; it may rarely be extended to forty-eight hours or even longer in an extremely serious case.  The hartal is usually city-wide or village-wide, although it may occur over a more extended area, including the whole nation.  Generally speaking, there is greater emphasis in the hartal than in the general strike on its voluntary nature, even to the point of laborers abstaining from work only after obtaining permission from their employers.  Also, shop owners and businessmen fully participate by closing their establishments and factories.

This is one of the forms of nonviolent action known to ancient India, where it was used against the prince or king to make him aware of the unpopularity of a certain edict or other government measure.  The hartal is also used at a time of national mourning.

Gandhi employed this ancient method in resistance movements he led.  He often used the hartal at the beginning of a struggle with the intent of purifying the participants in the struggle, of testing their feelings on the issue, and arousing the imagination of the people and the opponent.  It was used, for example, at the beginning of the nationwide satyagraha campaign in India against the Rowlatt Bills in 1919, and at the beginning of and during the 1930-31 satyagraha campaign for independence, especially to protest the arrest of important leaders.

Gandhi emphasized the inward readiness required to begin a struggle.  Can we implement an Americanized version of hartal?  Perhaps it would lack some of the explicit spiritual aspects (attending vigils could count), but include the voluntary component (no union asking membership to strike), the notion of asking for permission to not work (maybe in the form of using sick or personal time), the limited duration (24 hours) and intent (protest more than true economic intervention). Maybe use this specifically in DC as opposed to nationwide?

As usual, I don't have a specific formulation of how to apply these just yet, and am looking for other people's thoughts on their practicality and usefulness particularly in the fight for HR676.  I do think peace and justice activists need to consider updating tactics and strategy to work more effectively in the current political, economic and media environment, and one or more flavors of strike really ought to be part of the discussion.

ntodd

PS--I appreciate the feedback from some commenters at Great Orange Satan about my timing of these posts, so introduction of new Methods might move to a day other than Sunday.

(Post at Pax Americana, Dohiyi Mir, Green Mountain Code Pink, Corrente and Daily Kos.)

Bipartisanship Is The Reformkiller

He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing.

 - Paul "Muad Dib" Atriedes

Sorry for the scifi references, but it's really true, eh?  It's something the GOP has learned quite well: they destroyed American freedoms and the US economy, and they still control us even in the Minority.

The difference between them and progressive Kill-the-Billers is that their end goal is just to destroy, whereas we want to wrest control from them to actually protect reform.  We don't want to destroy HCR in order to save it; we want to destroy a specific thing that is to our mind anathema to reform.  Yet the threat to kill this particular bill can, in the end, save it along with reform itself.

Dems are desperate to pass something so they don't look hapless and ineffective (as I've said before, I think that ship sailed long ago).  They hoped gutting reform would get GOP votes, but it didn't.  They lost the MA Senate race in part for not going far enough, providing the public option that most Americans want (woman under bus notwithstanding).

It's time to double down.  Without meaningful reform, at the very least PO if not removing anti-abortion language and Section 1332, House progs can easily scuttle the bill.  That threat might very well be enough to fix it now because leadership is scared about electoral prospects in November.

The GOP plays hardball all the time and gets what it wants.  Progs can do it, too: give us back the reforms we voted for that the Senate killed, or we kill the whole thing.  Instead of further capitulation, showing resolve would change the dynamic and allow us to negotiate from a position of strength.

If the bill does die, obviously the Dems need to pass something quickly.  So kick HR676 out of the various committees its stuck in by virtue of raw majority power, schedule a floor vote and send it to the Senate. 

In the other chamber the Majority should forego the usual 60 vote threshold established by unanimous consent agreement (Feingold, Sanders, I'm looking to you to object).  Force the GOP and Lieberman either filibuster or use other parliamentary procedures to delay a vote and now it's clear they are obstructing reform. 

That provides time to mobilize people outside the beltway to escalate action and lobby "moderates," etc.  Even Strom Thurmond couldn't delay Civil Rights legislation forever, so filibusters and quorum calls cannot destroy the bill--only Senate Democrats giving in to the Minority can do that.

An old Cosby line comes to mind: I brought you into this world, I can take you out. 

The Dems were ineffective as the Minority, but when they asked us to we gave them Congress in 2006.  They were an ineffective as the Majority, but when they asked for more seats in the house and 60 votes in the Senate, we gave it to them in 2008, and the Presidency.  We did this in good faith and they still haven't held up their end of the bargain.

We brought them into power, they have thus far failed to act, and we must threaten to get them out of power.  There's still time for behavior correction, but we must stand firm in our discipline lest they assume once again that we have nobody else to turn to come election time.

People don't like it when I say we're partially to blame here.  Surely the Dems are the primary people at fault, but to a certain degree we let them fail.  They're politicians and we've been fundamentally disengaged, hoping in the wake of Bush that by default, without our pushing, they'd get their act together.

Now we must do do so.

Threaten the status quo of corporate domination--through lobbying, campaign contributions, and now free spending in elections--that has hampered reform of not just health care.  The only thing pols really respond to is fear of losing in November. 

Primary and General challenges are a great thing we should bring to bear, but incumbents have little fear of overthrow usually.  So we need to change the equation through massive direct action before then and show them we're serious.  Dems think in the end we have to vote for them, but Massachussets showed that wasn't true.  That upset was a good down payment on our electoral threats, but we need followup.

[I'm just going to steal something I said in response to comments on another post the other day.  Apologies for lazy, slightly-modified plagiarism.]

I've tried to rally Labor, MoveOn, DFA, NOW, NARAL, Planned Parenthood, A-list bloggers and anybody who else who has a big audience and platform to organize a variety of escalating forms of direct action since March. I would not presume to have the best plan without people engaging in constructive debate about such things, but I have frequently outlined it thus:

Start with petitions and e-mail campaigns issuing the demand for HR676 and specifying a collective response in the event of capitulation (which we've seen piecemeal with SP becoming PO, Stupak, loss of PO, Section 1332, etc), to include withdrawal of support from incumbent Democrats in primaries and general elections and the following:

• Weekly vigils in front of local Congressional and insurance offices.
• Coordinated national marches in state capitals and/or major cities.
• Weekend march in DC in conjunction with mass lobbying on the Hill.
• Boycotts (at least secondary targets like cable companies if not riskier focus on primary targets like ins cos).
• "Sick-in" strikes.
• Weekday marches in DC and around the nation, mass lobbying, and civil disobedience.

At this point, our demands have been issued but few significant threats were made. For example, Labor promised to not support Dems in 2010 until they got the Caddy tax compromise protecting their constituency. So the divide and conquer plan has worked as we've allowed an already watered down compromise get compromised further, with bribes thrown to a variety of groups to win their buy-in while others were marginalized.

So now I'm more of the mind that we have to leap right into economic intervention, maybe with mass lobbying on Congressional delegations in-district and at the Capitol, another march or set of marches, and civil disobedience thrown in to get visuals.

Yeahyeahyeah, I love my tasty Kool Aid. For once I'd really like to see people skip the "that shit'll never work" knee-jerk response and think about how we could make it work.  Since the usual approaches haven't magically gotten us a PO let alone single-payer, perhaps we could try something new (to this issue) and apply tactics and strategies that have effected great social change in our recent history.

But other suggestions have left me cold: fix it later won't work as I see it post-MA and Citizens United, and the Dems are in danger of not only losing seats but perhaps even the Majority.  Time is of the essence to pass HCR, and we can even save the Dems in spite of themselves by disrupting corporate influence a bit and forcing the Majority to get a meaningful bill out of the bipartisan morass that threatens to kill real reform.

ntodd

PS--Speaking of in-district lobbying, Ericka, Sam and I are headed to Representative Peter Welch's office in Burlington before I have to teach today.

(Post at Pax Americana, Dohiyi Mir, Green Mountain Code Pink, Corrente and Daily Kos.)

"Miss HCR Born 2009 Died 2010"

I thought perhaps yesterday's example of British abolitionists' sugar boycott was a bit remote for Americans, so today I'd like to introduce a few consumers' boycotts closer to home.

First, the AP reported on April 5, 1960:

A new battlecry, "No fashions for Easter," has been sounded in the fight by Negroes for equal treatment in Southern business establishments.

Dr. Vivian Henderson, an economics professor at Fisk University, Nashville, Tenn, urged more than 500 Negroes at a meeting in Nashville to continue boycotting downtown business firms, even to the point of passing up Easter finery.

The boycotts were begun two weeks ago in support of efforts to end racial segregation at lunch counters. Henderson said, "Millions of dollars are being lost by the city of Nashville over a 25-cent hamburger."

Spending by African-Americans was estimated at the time to be worth about $50M a year in Nashville, with $10M spent just downtown.  It took just about a month for the boycott's full impact to be felt, and a mere month later 69 cities were under the same nonviolent assault.

Events in Nashville came to a head on April 19, when the home of Alexander Looby, lawyer for students conducting the lunch counter sit-ins, was bombed.  After 3000 people marched on City Hall to confront Mayor Ben West one of the students, Diane Nash, asked, "do you feel it is wrong to discriminate against a person solely on the basis of their race or color?"

The question went to the heart of nonviolence, bypassing all the political boilerplate and appealing directly to West's conscience. The mayor did not disappoint. He nodded—and then said yes. 'They asked me some pretty soul-searching questions—and one that was addressed to me as a man." West said years later "And I found that I had to answer it frankly and honestly—that I did not agree that it was morally right for someone to sell them merchandise and refuse them service. And I had to answer it just exactly like that."

Stunned by West's honesty, the marchers burst into thunderous applause, and the next day, the Nashville Tennessean ran a huge headline: INTEGRATE COUNTERS—MAYOR. [Note: he also said it was up to the businesses to decide, which the The Nashville Banner focused on.] Three weeks later, six downtown stores targeted by demonstrators opened their lunch counters to blacks

It was an enormous victory for the fledgling movement. The day after the march, Martin Luther King came to Nashville to honor the students. Calling their campaign the "best organized and the most disciplined" in the South, he said he had come "not to bring inspiration but to gain inspiration from the great movement that has taken place in this community."

In The Politics of Nonviolent Action, Gene Sharp made note of a few more boycotts for equality:

In 1938, as part of a jobs-for-Negroes movement...Negroes in Harlem, New York City, conducted a "blackout boycott" every Tuesday night by turning off electricity and lighting candles to induce Consolidated Edison Co. to hire Negroes in jobs above the unskilled level...During the summer of 1960 about 250,000 people in the Philadelphia area carried out a "selective patronage program" against the Tasty Baking Co...in order to obtain equal job opportunities for Negroes.  Faced with further boycotts, the Pepsi-Cola Company and Gulf Oil in Philadelphia quickly capitulated and hired Negroes for positions from which they had previously been excluded.

Boycotts and "buycotts" were also used by the abolitionist movement in the United States in the 1820s:

Like every episode of consumer activism in every era of U.S history, the boycotters of this period drew, both explicitly and implicitly, on the theories and actions of previous groups. All of these antebellum movements linked their efforts to the nonimportation campaigns of the Revolutionary generation. The free produce abolitionists in particular built on a nearly continuous tradition of consumer protest that long preceded their movement.

Many of them were inspired by the example of John Woolman (1720-1772), the Quaker who, as a young man, made the decision to eschew all commercial connections with slavery; for example, he wore undyed clothing because slaves made dyes. Woolman's journals, first published in 1774, provided a personal model of the eschewal of slave-made goods.

As the poet and free labor advocate John Greenleaf Whittier wrote in an introduction to an edition of Woolman's journals that also nicely describes the broader phenomenology of the spread of consumer activism, "We are often surprised to find the initial link in the chain of causes to be some comparatively obscure individual, the divine commission and significance of whose life were scarcely understood by his contemporaries, and perhaps not even by himself. The little one has become a thousand; the handful of corn shakes like Lebanon."

Free produce advocates were also inspired by the Quaker Elias Hicks's Observations on the Slavery of the Africans (1811) Hicks went beyond Woolman's personal politics by imploring other Quakers to avoid slave-produced goods. In addition, American abolitionists were well aware of the organized and popular boycotts of slave-produced sugar that began in Britain in the 1790s and continued sporadically through the 1820s.

Finally, many free producers were doubtless aware of the maple sugar craze of the early 1790s, in which Benjamin Franklin and others encouraged entrepreneurial Americans to market the sweet sap of the maple tree as an alternative to slave-grown cane sugar.  The successful marketing of maple sugar, claimed one advocate, would "diminish so many strokes of the whip which our luxury draws upon the blacks."

...

The early movements introduced tensions that continue to exist within consumer activism, occasionally divide consumer activists, and persist in frustrating their opponents within and outside the cause.  For example, there were no fiercer critics of the free produce efforts than fellow abolitionists...

I certainly don't want to overstate the power of the boycott in this instance.  Clearly our Civil War settled the issue of the South's peculiar institution through violence, so we'll never know if this nonviolent intervention along with other economic factors would have, as some have suggested, made emancipation inevitable.

What I found most instructive about this example is that when actionists engage, they almost inevitably catch flak from their ostensible allies within a movement.  As Sam Adams (no, not my son's namesake) once said: Action is always going to be more controversial than inaction.

Boycotts, or nonimportation agreements, were also used by Americans in response to the Stamp Act and other British acts to impose taxes and/or restrictions on colonial life and commerce. 

Courtesy the Library of Congress. A March 18, 1766, cartoon titled, "The repeal or the funeral of Miss Ame-stamp." Shows a funeral procession on the banks of the Thames...George Grenville carries a coffin inscribed "Miss Ame-stamp B. 1765 died 1766."

Ray Raphael wrote in The First American Revolution: Before Lexington And Concord:

In 1768 the British Parliament and the Crown, [intent] on raising money from the colonies and protecting British industry, imposed a duty on goods exported to the colonies, such as glass, lead, paint, paper, and tea.  This new wave of taxation, embodied in the Townshend Revenue Act, further fueled the political flames in Massachusetts.  The House responded by discouraging British imports and encouraging home manufacture...

This was a hard program to oppose since it would simultaneously help the balance of trade, force Parliament to take note of the colonists, and encourage industry and moral fortitude on a personal level...various nonimportation agreements circulated among the citizenry, with the signers pledging not to buy any goods from merchants who peddled imported products.

Robert Chaffin adds:

To the merchants of the great ports it was a disagreeable necessity: they would not accept Parliament's right to tax them, but transatlantic commerce was their life. But to Philadelphia's artisans it was another matter. Like New Yorkers and Bostonians, Philadelphians were enduring the depression that had settled on the colonies at the end of the Seven Years' War. It seemed to the artisans that non-importation offered a chance to bring prosperity back. Without British imports there would be more of a market for their own goods But when Parliament repealed four of the five Townshend Duties in 1770, leaving only the duty on tea in place, nonimportation began to collapse.

Nonimportation was so effective that when it achieved most of the colonists' aims, the movement started to fade.  Not unlike what we saw with the antiwar movement when Vietnam wound down, it would seem.

With previous victories in mind, the tactic continued to be used against a variety of British acts, including the Tea Act in 1773 (try to find the irony lost on today's Tea Partiers): By reducing the tax on imported British tea, this act gave British merchants an unfair advantage in selling their tea in America.  And returning to Raphael, we see Worcester held a town meeting in March 1774:

Responding to "a Request of Twenty-seven of the Freeholders and other inhabitants," the town at this time addressed the two most pressing issues facing people of Massachusetts: the tax on tea and the Crown's payment of executive and judicial salaries [a major concern because it threatened the independence of officers in the colonies].  In [a strongly worded statement approved by a narrow margin], the town resolved not to purchase imported tea and also promoted a secondary boycott: anybody who sold contraband tea, the citizens declared, had "justly merited our Indignation, and Contempt, and must be considered, and treated by us, as enimys [sic] and trators [sic] to their Country."

Which brings us back to my musings on Sunday: if targeting insurance companies is not practicable, how about ancillary corporations like cable companies who carry their ads and are part of the corporatist problem?

With the Democrats so hapless and ineffective, we might not need to engage in boycotts to kill the health care bill that's taken a year to deform.  However, unlike the Democrats, we need to consider a Plan B.  Perhaps that includes organizing consumer boycotts and other direct action to get real reform like Medicare for All and HR676.

ntodd

(Post at Pax Americana, Dohiyi Mir, Green Mountain Code Pink, Corrente and Daily Kos.)

Blood Sweetened Insurance

I recall the first time I went to the Soviet Union in 1986.  I spoke very little Russian at the time, not even enough to get by, but our group sponsored by Putney Student Travel was led by a couple Russian majors from Dartmouth. 

During an orientation we had in Helsinki just before heading by train to Leningrad there was some confusion as to when the serfs had been freed.  I asserted that Alexander II had done so in 1861, but nobody would believe me because Dog knows nobody could've emancipated their servile underclass before Lincoln.  Of course...*cough*.

Yes, know-it-alls are always extremely popular.  But that's not my point!  Geesh.  This anecdote was brought to mind because of a Mother Jones article I read about British abolition which noted:

Every American schoolchild learns about the Underground Railroad and the Emancipation Proclamation. But our self-centered textbooks often skip over the fact that in the superpower of the time slavery ended a full quarter-century earlier. For more than two decades before the Civil War, the holiday celebrated most fervently by free blacks in the American North was not July 4 (when they were at risk of attack from drunken white mobs) but August 1, Emancipation Day in the British Empire.

Anyway, it was just a subtle example of our intrinsic American exceptionalism.  Not much of a leap from "knowing" the US as beacon of freedom must have been first to rid itself of slavery to "knowing" methods used by British abolitionists could not be used in the US now to bring about social change.

I've been arguing that there is nothing really special about the American experience, even in this ultra-consumerist era where corporatists hold sway, that prevents us from employing similar tactics.  And the the article goes on to describe the successful approach we could learn from that ended slavery in Britain:

The most important expression of public feeling came on great, stiff rolls of parchment. By the time Parliament adjourned for the year, petitions asking for abolition or reform of the slave trade had been signed by more than 60,000 people. Petitions were a time-honored means of pressure in a country where voters had no control whatever over the House of Lords, and where fewer than one adult man in ten could vote for the House of Commons. Anti-slave-trade petitions-never seen before-suddenly outnumbered those on all other subjects combined.

The superbly organized anti-slavery committee also pioneered several techniques used ever since. For example, they periodically printed copies of "a Letter to our Friends in the Country, to inform them of the state of the Business" -- the ancestor of many a newsletter, print or electronic, published by activist groups today. They also agreed on a piece of text delivered to every donor in greater London appealing for another contribution, at least as big as the last. This may have been history's first direct-mail fundraising letter.

When the famous one-legged pottery entrepreneur Josiah Wedgwood joined the committee, he had one of his craftsmen make a bas-relief of a kneeling slave, in chains, encircled by the legend "Am I Not a Man and a Brother?" American anti-slavery sympathizer Benjamin Franklin, impressed, declared that the image had an impact "equal to that of the best written Pamphlet."

Clarkson gave out 500 of these medallions on his organizing trips. "Of the ladies, several wore them in bracelets, and others had them fitted up in an ornamental manner as pins for their hair." The equivalent of the lapel buttons we wear for an electoral campaign, this was probably the first widespread use of a logo designed for a political cause. It was the 18th century's "new media."

Within a few years, another tactic arose from the grassroots. Throughout the length and breadth of the British Isles, people stopped eating the major product harvested by British slaves: sugar. Clarkson was delighted to find a "remedy, which the people were... taking into their own hands.... Rich and poor, churchmen and dissenters.... By the best computation I was able to make from notes taken down in my journey, no fewer than three hundred thousand persons had abandoned the use of sugar."

Almost like "fair trade" food labeling today, advertisements quickly filled the press: "BENJAMIN TRAVERS, Sugar-Refiner, acquaints the Publick that he has now an assortment of Loaves, Lumps, Powder Sugar, and Syrup, ready for sale...produced by the labour of FREEMEN." Then, as now, the full workings of a globalized economy were largely invisible. The boycott caught people's imagination because it brought these hidden ties to light. The poet Robert Southey spoke of tea as "the blood-sweetened beverage."

Slavery advocates were horrified. One rushed out a counterpamphlet claiming that "sugar is not a luxury; but...a necessary of life; and great injury have many persons done to their constitutions by totally abstaining from it."

Note the use of multiple tactics, including forms of protest and persuasion through various communication channels, capped by economic intervention.  Adam Hochschild describes the effort in Bury the Chains:

Like many such actions today, the sugar boycott was partly symbolic.  Systematically giving up all slave-​grown products would have required Britons to also stop using tobacco, coffee, and cotton clothing (much of it woven in the mills of staunchly antislavery Manchester).  Nonetheless, a boycott of sugar was potentially a powerful weapon because the country
consumed so much of it.  In the eighteenth century, sugar was Britain’s largest import...Everyone could understand the logic of the sugar boycott, even children.…

Quietly but subversively, the boycott added a new dimension to British political life.  At a time when only a small fraction of the population could vote, citizens took upon themselves the power to act when Parliament had not.  “The legislature having refused to interpose, the people are now necessarily called on,” wrote one boycotter.  The boycott was radical in yet another way, made explicit in at least one pamphlet: it struck not just at the slave trade but at slavery itself.  And, finally, the boycott was largely put into effect by those who bought and cooked the family food: women.

Explicit appeals to join in abstention were made to women who made up half of the 300 to 400 thousand Britons who participated.  Women who, as was observed at the time, "have no voice at present in these matters."  Even those who were as yet disenfranchised had power to help free other human beings from bondage.

Perhaps woman, who won their suffrage through further hard work in both the UK and the US over a century later, can lead our fight for equitable access to healthcare. 

What say you, NOW, NARAL, Planned Parenthood, et al?  Think you can mobilize your large memberships to step up the game in this generation's civil rights struggle?  After all, being a women shouldn't be a pre-existing condition, though it seems that hoping the Democrats will do the right thing might be...

ntodd

(Post at Pax Americana, Dohiyi Mir, Green Mountain Code Pink, Corrente and Daily Kos.)

198 More Sundays: Power Of The People And The Purse

I began a couple weeks ago to try introducing direct action to a wider audience by covering the Move Your Money campaign.  I followed that up the next week with a discussion of sedition, which bloggers can engage in to some extent.

My idea was that I should skip any preliminary discussion of theory and history to more quickly get into things people could easily start doing.  Going for the low-hanging fruit, I figured people would start thinking about the resistance they're a part of and start to see their inherent power, then perhaps the larger context would become more apparent.

However, I see that our educational system is so lacking in any treatment of nonviolent social and revolutionary movements, there is a good deal of misunderstanding about and bias against their application today.  I won't go tinfoil and suggest that's a deliberate ploy by our overlords to make people passive, but the effect is the same: we've been convinced we have no recourse so might as well stay at home and enjoy the consumer items corporatism bribes us with.

I guess I should therefore take a step back and present the big picture before getting into today's specific form of action.  A good place to start is whit what Gene Sharp, the person who originally cataloged the 198 Methods that I'm always going on about, explaining a bit about nonviolent action:

"If the withholding is undertaken by enough people for a long enough period of time, then the regime will have to come to terms or it will be collapsed. Nonviolent action seeks to bring about change in three ways. The first is conversion, which is the rarest. The second is accommodation, which is the most usual. The third is nonviolent coercion, which is the most extreme of all forms."

Sharp is at pains to divest nonviolent action of any semblance of passivity. He says: "Nonviolent action is a means of combat, as is war. It involves the matching of forces and the waging of "battles", requires wise strategy and tactics and demands of its "soldiers courage, discipline and Sacrifice'. Sharp also tries to make it different from anarchism. It is based on fear of sanctions as well as consent emanating extra constitutional tenor. He says that it is possible to integrate nonviolent action into a constitutional system of government. Here, Sharp at once defends the existence of the state, integrates nonviolent action as democratic and posits it as a perennial element in society capable of defending and sustaining human freedom. He detaches nonviolence from its normative life forms as Gandhi did in his critique of modem civilisation and incorporates it as a legitimate mode of action rooted in liberal democracy.

Sharp first cataloged his methods in 1973's The Politics of Nonviolent Action and revisited them in his 2005 book, Waging Nonviolent Struggle: 20th Century Practice and 21st Century Potential.  They fall into three overarching categories: actions to suspend social relations, actions to suspend economic relations, and actions to suspend political submission and assistance.

When I bring up direction action, people often only think of protest marches.  They correctly observe that such demonstrations "don't work": we marched against the Iraq War, for example, and Bush still invaded.  The problem is that marches are a type of protest and persusasion, which Sharp describes in Waging Nonviolent Struggle:

Nonviolent protest and persuasion include numerous methods that are mainly symbolic acts of peaceful opposition or attempted persuasion.  These extend beyond verbal expressions of opinion but stop short of noncooperation or nonviolent intervention.  The use of these methods shows that the resisters are against or in favor of something, the degree of opposition or support, and, sometimes, the number of people involved.

The impact of these methods on the attitudes of others will vary considerably.  It is possible that where a particular method is common, its influence in a single instance may be less than in locations where the method has hitherto been rare or unknown.  The political conditions in which the method occurs are also likely to influence its impact.  Dictatorial conditions make an act of nonviolent protest less common and more dangerous.  Hence, if it does occur, the act may be more dramatic and may receive greater attention than it would where the act is common or carries no penalty.

The message may be intended to influence the opponents, the public, the grievance group, or a combination of the three.  Attempts to influence the opponents usually focus on convincing them to correct or halt certain actions, or to do what the grievance group wants.  The methods of nonviolent protest and persuasion may also be selected to facilitate a concurrent or later application of other methods, especially the forms of noncooperation.

Some Methods are designed to garner sympathy and persuade people to come to your side.  Some intend to shame those in power.  And some merely register dissent.

Other Methods are more intense and meant to tangibly threaten the opponent, which could be a regime, a particular social group or even corporations.  Those are forms of noncooperation (social, political, and economic), which Sharp describes:

Overwhelmingly, the methods of nonviolent struggle involve noncooperation with the opponents.  "Noncooperation" means that the resisters in a conflict either deliberately withdraw some form or degree of existing cooperation with the opponents or the resisters refuse to initiate certain forms of new cooperation.  Noncooperation involves deliberate discontinuance, withholding, or defiance of certain existing relationships--social, economic, or political.  The action may be spontaneous or planned, and it may be legal or illegal.

The impact of the various forms of noncooperation hinges heavily on the number of people participating in the use of the methods and the degree to which the opponents are dependent on the persons and groups that are refusing cooperation.

I've heard people say, "I'd do that, but I don't want to be the only one."  A minority of one is certainly more symbolic and less effective than a mass movement, yet you do have start somewhere.  And if you consider blogs as being a cheap and fairly wide-reaching--though admittedly still not having as the same penetration as TV or radio as yet--medium that can help coordinate collective efforts, you won't be alone for very long if you're willing to take a risk.

One type of collective noncooperation in the economic sphere has been widely used since at least the 18th Century, such as when British abolitionists responded to Parliament's failure to abolish slavery (a great early example I will cover later): Method 71. Consumers' boycott.

Again, Sharp:

An economic boycott is the refusal to buy, sell, handle or distribute specific goods and services, and often also includes efforts to induce others to withdraw such cooperation.

Just as with Move Your Money, this tactic (generally) carries less risk with it than something like civil disobedience and allows individuals and groups to flex their economic muscle.  More importantly, this is a step up from just trying to persuade an opponent to do the right thing: now you're threatening them directly by cutting off the lifeblood of their revenue.  Following a few simple rules, there have been many successful consumer boycotts just in the last 20 years, so clearly it's still a useful tool in our kit.

So when I use the word 'escalate' I don't mean getting more people to more marches.  I'm talking about upping the ante in terms of psychological pressure, physical intervention and economic impact.  Once you've issued your demands with a "down payment" of action in the form of protest and persuasion Methods, you must move on to higher-level actions and ratchet up the force brought to bear through tactics like coordinated boycotts.

Okay, people have been able to get corporations to change some policies and whatnot, but how could we use this Method for something like HCR?  Ignoring the difficult logistics for a moment, an obvious target would be the insurance companies themselves.  If we were to attack their obscene, ever-growing profits by massively refusing to pay premiums after demanding they end policy rescissions, stop increasing premiums, reduce denial of claims, etc, they would necessarily have to accommodate us.  What's more, we probably would put indirect pressure on politicians who get campaign contributions from their corporate constituents, so government policy could also be influenced.

Now, of course that would be very difficult to organize.  I'm not saying it wouldn't work, because it absolutely would.  When people say "it won't work" they're usually conflating the issues of an action's effectiveness vs mobilizing people to act, and really mean "it won't get anybody on board."  In this specific example, there is too much to risk from some folks' perspective--there's no alternative to insurance available for most--not to mention that so much insurance is through employers and trying to get them to stop paying premiums would be extremely problematic.

So regarding the insurance companies themselves we probably would be better served by sticking with symbolic acts of protests.  Perhaps sending mock rescissions along with premiums, or standing vigil outside their offices, etc.

Maybe instead we could make more of a flanking maneuver and target other corporate entities that are tangentially related.  The media is certainly part of the problem, so what about boycotting cable companies who take ad dollars from insurance companies and deliver "news" shows that misinform the electorate?  Cancel your cable TV and you will harm their revenue stream, plus you could redirect some of those savings to other forms of action, donations to groups doing yeoman's work on reform and the like.

What other corpos could we try this on?  Which targets would be the most likely to help us mobilize participation? How would we organize it?

As we experiment, we must keep in mind that we can't expect this Method alone to carry the day.  What's more, boycotts themselves can divide a movement as some factions might harbor concern about potential negative consequences, timing and other issues, so we can't count on everybody buying into the idea (which ultimately can limit effectiveness).  Thus I'll be elaborating on more tactics in the coming weeks so we can have a fuller toolkit to work with.

ntodd

(Post at Pax Americana, Dohiyi Mir, Green Mountain Code Pink, Corrente and Daily Kos.)

Hear Us Roar

NYTimes on April 21, 1921:

Withdrawal of the money of all members of labor organizations frorn Boston banks was recommended by the Strike Committee of the United Building Trades Council in a resolution adopted here today. This action was urged following a statement by E. A. Johnson, Secretary of the council, that Parker F. Soule, President of the Building Trades Employers’ Association, recently had declared before the State Board of Conciliation and Arbitration that reduction of wages had been forced by the banks and money interests of the city.

...

About 10,000 building trades employees have been idle here since last January, when the Employers’ Association announced a. wage cut to 90 cents an hour from a previous rate of $1. \Vithin the last week the employers announced they would resume building under open shop conditions at the 90-cent wage and would not deal with labor unions for at least the rest of 1921.

Overall it appears the effort had an impact:

On July 14, 1922, a new general building trades agreement was signed in the presence of His Honor, the Mayor of Boston, by representatives of the Building Trades Employers' Association and the United Building Trades Council of Boston. The last formal agreement in effect between the two organizations named expired on December 31, 1920. Efforts to renew it or to substitute a new agreement, were unsuccessful and a strike of organized building tradesmen in Boston employed by members of the Association took place on January 20, 1921. Efforts to bring the controversy to an end were unavailing and there was a marked cessation of building operations as a result of the strike.

Since that time conditions have been gradually returning to normal and there has been an imperative demand for all classes of structures. Accordingly, negotiations were again resumed between the Employers' Association and the Council in an endeavor to effect a new general agreement, which would do much toward stabilizing the industry and enable both employers and employees to proceed more advantageously with the work in hand.

Limited issues in limited geography, but still you can extrapolate and see how a nationwide movement to threaten monied interests through a variety of means including withdrawal of bank deposits can help achieve our aims of getting real HCR, withdrawing from Afghanistan, passing marriage equality, etc.

Specifically following up on the "move your money" tactic, Bill Maher explains:

On the eve of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission's first day of hearings, where the CEOs of four of America's largest banks are scheduled to testify about the banks' roles in the financial meltdown, Bill Maher explains why you should move your money out of a "too big to fail" bank and put it into a local community bank or credit union.

According to Maher: "This is not a conservative idea or a liberal idea. It's not left or right. It's populism at its best."

Check out the accompanying video and the tool for finding local banks.  My paltry funds are already in an old community bank, but hopefully you can find a place to put your monies that can send a message to the powers that be.

ntodd

(Post at Pax Americana, Dohiyi Mir, Green Mountain Code Pink, Corrente and Daily Kos.)

198 More Sundays: Nice Bank, Be A Shame If Something Happened To It

As threatened promised, I'm following up on yesterday's epic crossposted blog entry by reviving Pax Americana's regular 198 Sundays feature.  Since I'm trying to get my seditious ideas more widely disseminated, I'm going to pull the same trick and publish this in several channels.

I had a little difficulty deciding what Method to look at.  In a sidebar chat with Lambert, we figured that what's important is not just saying "here's 198 ways we could maybe fight the power" but providing more concrete success stories with specific tactical suggestions. 

So should I go with a basic Method to illustrate where I would start and try to paint a picture of escalation in a strategic context, or choose a more dramatic example that might spark better discussion and lead to an organic strategic arc?  I considered looking at some things that have come up in yesterday's threads, like boycotts and strikes, and stuff like sedition, which would be right up most bloggers' alley.

In the end I thought something that's already getting some attention on a larger online platform and now in the mainstream media would be best.  So here's a reprise of Method: 86. Withdrawal of bank deposits.

Money deposited in private or government banks or government savings systems may be withdrawn either as an expression of protest against the government or as a means of noncooperation intended to help overthrow an unsteady government.

For example, the withdrawal of bank deposits was called for at least twice during the 1905 Revolution in Russia--first by the All-Russian Peasant Union at its founding conference in midsummer 1905, and second, by the St Petersburg Soviet on December 2, 1905.  This was designed to weaken foreign confidence in the Russian economy and government and thus prevent the government from obtaining a foreign loan to be used to combat the revolution.

Now the 1905 Russian Revolution--which I studied in the 80s and 90s as a Russian/Soviet Studies major--is probably remote to most Americans.  Regardless, the basic premise no matter where or when it's used is that withdrawing money from financial institutions can directly protest an opponent or be a sort of flanking maneuver to achieve a larger aim.

A current application comes from Arianna Huffington.

It has been two weeks since Arianna Huffington began imploring people to move their money to small institutions, and big banks do not appear any worse for the wear.

But whether Huffington's much-talked-about campaign proves to be anything more than a flash in the pan is beside the point. The point is that the pundit turned Web entrepreneur has tapped into an undeniable aspect of the consumer psyche — a festering resentment of big banks and a growing frustration with government officials seen as having donned kid gloves for a task that might have required brass knuckles.

At first blush, any problems presented by the Move Your Money project seem to be confined to the realm of optics. After all, Huffington appeals to a narrow slice of a fragmented society, and even her biggest fans might be stymied by inertia when contemplating the idea of moving their checking accounts — especially with so many other New Year's resolutions in need of follow-through.

But down the road, the suspicion and anger that has been building toward big banks could cause damage at the margins. That may sound minor, until one thinks about how much of a company's fate — particularly in industries becoming more and more commoditized — is decided at the margins.

...

[I]t would take an awful lot of dissatisfaction to persuade customers of Citigroup Inc. or Bank of America Corp. — or any company that has similarly engendered public angst over the course of this crisis — to actually yank deposits. But it also would be easy for those customers to look elsewhere when it comes to taking out mortgages, selecting wealth advisers or seeking any of the other products and services that banks would hope to cross-sell to clients.

...

In online postings, aggrieved bank customers inspired by Huffington's Move Your Money campaign describe their participation as an exercise in revenge, a way to take action against a system in which they otherwise feel profound helplessness. Dramatic — and yet these people will be a mere blip on the radar screen for big banks.

The real impact of the movement is in the education it provides people about their banking options — something that may not move them to close accounts, but could stick with them next time they need bankservices.

Since Move Your Money's Dec. 29 kickoff, daily Web traffic has more than tripled on the National Association of Federal Credit Unions' CULookUp.com, a credit union locator site. That's no proxy for new account openings, but NAFCU President Fred Becker said it is a good indication that bank customers are looking for alternatives.

Alternet puts it this way:

Reacquire your wealth. The easiest way for the Federal Reserve, led by Time Magazine's ludicrous Person of the Year Ben Bernanke, to pick your pocket is through your accounts and investments, which can be liquidated in the blink of a discount window's eye. Withdraw any extra cash you have, close whatever extra accounts you have, and take it somewhere besides Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase or another bailout addict. Better yet, keep it on the sidelines. The Fed hates that and so do the markets, which have nothing to do with you anyway. That game is above your head, and rigged outright. You either play with the house, or you play your conscience. Right now, your conscience should be worrying about another economic clusterfuck. Plus, the banks left standing after the financial crashes of the last few years are fatter than ever, and are still hoarding cash instead of lending it.  

“It’s insanity that the too-big-to-fail institutions are even bigger today than they were,” Vermont's independent Senator Bernie Sanders told Bloomberg. “God forbid we have another financial crisis.”  

God forbid? These banks have gotten bigger specifically to survive the next crisis they have already priced into the market. Thanks to Congress, the Fed and the last two administrations, they've got your cash sitting in their vaults, whistling while they wait. Take it out.

One might also take their other advice of eliminating credit as much as possible.  That's inflationary and part of what has created our unsustainable, consumerist economy.

Anyway, this Method isn't specifically about HCR, but indirectly related because we're talking about resisting entrenched monied interests, and the massive bank bailouts come at a time when we're told there's no money for single-payer or a public option.  It also is a form of economic intervention that can put those in power on notice that we can actually threaten the financial system's status quo.  And best of all, it's actually a fairly accessible, low-risk action anybody can take that could easily become a mass trend.

For a little inspiration, I like to turn to one of my heroes, Mario Savio:

There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!

He provides us with a great example of another Method, but right now just consider his overall message and passion: stop the economic machinery of power by refusing to be a cog in it!

ntodd

(Post at Pax Americana, Dohiyi Mir, Green Mountain Code Pink, Corrente and Daily Kos.)

Five Pointed Palm Exploding Heart Technique

AP:

Senior House Democrats have largely abandoned hopes of including a government-run insurance option in the final compromise health care bill taking shape, according to several officials, and are pushing for other measures to rein in private insurers.

Okay, this is where I traditionally caution what I call the Magnet Ballers--reference to 6yos' style of playing soccer--that this report may or may not mean anything substantive.  Could be a trial balloon.  Could be a smokescreen.  Could be somebody's personal agenda being pushed.

The main takeaway is that, of course, we never really know because we're not privy to all the wheelings and dealings behind the scenes and depend, therefore, upon reports from the inside.  Sure some reporters--even bloggers!--have good contacts that might have some info, but all of this stuff is run through so many filters that its veracity is rather doubtful.

So what can we do?  How about be engaged citizens and do a little responsible legwork of our own?

I know everybody's busy surviving, and of course the holidays took their toll, but if we've been given a Republic and HCR is an issue at least as important as Civil Rights, couldn't we step up our game a little bit?  There are plenty of comforts and distractions that demand our time, but they'll be there tomorrow after we've won this fight

I've been told that the netroots has done all it could because, afterall, Jane and FDL had that whip count tool!  That's not even a strawman on my part, FWIW.

Yes, some A-listers have written wonderful things excoriating Obama and the Dems for their complicity in this madness.  Some A-listers have admonished their readers to "light up" the switchboards.  Some A-listers have even made nifty little "online activism" tools.

Activism, by definition, cannot be done online.  At best you can be an online advocate.  At the worst and most passive you can delude yourself into thinking that expressing your opinion in an email or another damned Internet petition is activism. 

Activism requires being, you know...active.  Not necessarily getting into the streets, but certainly out of your chair and really, a bit out of your comfort zone.  Most importantly, it means not relying on proxies to do your work for you.

Lemme tell you a story about FDL's whip count.  Back during the debate about Afghan appropriations, Jane heard from one of her People On The Hill that my Representative, Peter Welch, was going to vote for the resolution, which we progs did not want to pass.  That was odd, I thought, because he'd voted no on the measure previously.  So I e-mailed his Legislative Assistant and learned that, in fact, he was going to continue his opposition (which he did in the final vote).

Lesson The First, Grasshopper: don't accept what somebody tells you somebody else said about somebody else.  To steal from Sean Connery, if you don't want a rotten apple, go to the tree, not the barrel.

That was an act of information gathering, of course, not an attempt to effect change.  Obviously one could turn such a contact around and make it into an expression of opinion in hopes of swaying one's Congressmember.  But that only goes so far.

I was in Harry Reid's office one day back in December 2007 during some controversial debate--I honestly cannot remember if it was Iraq appropriations or some other nonsense.  Phones were ringing off the hook with constituents weighing in, but during a brief lull I chatted with one of the Senator's staffers about the efficacy of phone calls.  She told me they don't pass every message along individually, but make a general note about the volume of calls regarding a particular issue and convey the overall sense to Reid.

In other words, "lighting up" the switchboards has about as much impact as any other polling: next to nil.  Frankly, if polling really mattered we'd have single-payer right now and I wouldn't be typing this much.  Such communication is valuable, absolutely, in setting down our demands, but doesn't put any political, economic or otherwise tangible pressure on a politician.  Call all you want, but lacking a physical presence--say...chatting with staff in Reid's office--you more than likely are not going to achieve your aim of swaying an opinion and vote.

Now let me think...who is in Congressional offices every day?  Oh yeah, lobbyists.  In fact, when Ericka and I went to visit Welch's LA back in May, the visitor signed into the office log just before us was a Lockheed Martin rep.

I know not everybody can be in their Congressmembers' faces every day like a K-Streeter.  However, we all can build up some level of relationship with our elected employees by making regular contact with them (e.g., through electronic means) and following up with more individual and/or collective actions on a less frequent basis (e.g., meeting with Reps and Senators during "district work periods").

We can certainly congratulate ourselves for what we've attempted so far, and use that as an excuse for being passive now in the face of continued mendacity.  It's not clear to me what more aggressive tactics would be really possible or effective--I do have some ideas--but what is clear to me is that we have not done enough.  Now's not the time to quit, but to escalate and try new things.

And we really do need to keep fighting the good fight rather than just accepting the shit sandwich that's being presented to us.  Fix The Billers: you told us the Senate bill could be remedied in reconciliation (which ain't happening) and/or conference (which ain't happening), so what exactly are you going to do now?

Over at Pax Americana my regular 198 Sundays feature has been on hiatus.  I'm reviving that in the HCR context.  In the coming days and weeks--because that's all the time we have before this fake reform is entrenched--I'll talk more about specific concrete actions everybody can take that collectively gives us an excellent chance of creating space for Obama and the Democrats to fulfill a campaign promise other than escalating in Afghanistan.

A few actions in other milieux for you to ponder in the meantime:

• From 2005: Sponsored by the Women and Girls Foundation of Western Pennsylvania, a group of 23 girls...initiated a "girl-cott" against T-shirts being sold by popular teen retailer Abercrombie and Fitch. The girls find these T-shirts offensive and I have to say that I agree. A few slogans on the front of the shirts:
  
      * Who Needs brains when you have these?
      * Blondes are adored, brunettes are ignored.
      * I make you look fat.
  
  The girls decided that they are demeaning and offensive and the girls started their "girl-cott". Their effort caught the attention of NBC's Today Show and the media onslaught began - MSNBC, CNN, and all the other major televised news outlets picked up the story. This past Friday, Abercrombie and Fitch announced that it would stop selling some of these offensive T-shirts. Chalk one up for a visible coalition of 23 principled girls and some media attention.

• March 2009: There was a rally scheduled...regarding AIDS policy where activists were going to unveil their "50 day report card".  when the Obama team found out they were going to get Fs, they called the organizers to ask what they could do to not get bad grades and proposed they meet to discuss the issues.  That never happened during the Bush Era.

• July 2009: According to data from the Center for Responsive Politics, Boeing and Lockheed Martin, manufacturers of the F-22, have given nearly $1.4 million in campaign contributions to 50 senators and spent nearly $9 million lobbying Congress as they fight to keep the expensive yet unwanted fighter jets in the budget.  [Lobbying efforts by Code Pink and other organizations and individuals helped convince Obama to threaten a veto if F-22 funding were included in appropriations, and lead to the Senate and House killing it.]

Extrapolate from those small victories achieved by small groups and consider the power of larger mobilization.  So what do you say, A-listers, Twitterers, MoveOn, Labor, et al?  Game to try?

ntodd

(x-posted at Corrente)

Coal In Our Stocking

Twas the night before Xmas and all through the Senate...

ntodd

Pardon My French

But that shit'll never work.

ntodd