Stop Me Before I Vote Again

I was not in Washington on the Mall Saturday -- shame on me. Here's a rather unfortunate take on the gathered multitude:

http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2007/1/27/183023/081

Okay. That is not really accurate. There were many more people than 'tens of thousands'. I can tell this by comparing the crowd to a Michigan football game. Michigan alum ejmw concurs with my estimate of well over the sellout crowd at Ann Arbor.

We gotta do a lot better than out-draw Wolverine home games -- say more like 10 cities, 10 million pairs of feet. This is way far from over; but the trajectory of these successive mob risings is not easily figured.

We may have seen an early apex; we may have seen merely the beginning. The youth mod department needs to kick in fiercely, and if the raw-to-cooked ratio in the Mall yesterday was higher on raw, we may see a serious size surge at the next goaround.

I think we'll need to galvanize with a to-do while there -- maybe a real "occupation" of the mall this spring. March in March at the time of the Congress votes on Iraq funds. And how's about a homecoming beltway encampment: we ain't leaving Peace-lager 07 (pop. 1 million) till our kids over there are back here.

Noting the obvious -- amazing how seldom people bother to do that:

At left is Andy Stern, prez of the Service Employees International Union, and he's a menace to America's entire underpaid wage force.

Despite his multimillion-dollar self-promotion campaign, everyone inside the labor movement knows Mr Purple Wave -- even on his best day of the month -- is an egomaniac and slippery power freak.

And summed up as a wage-class leader -- well, ask Sal Rosselli, president of United Healthcare Workers West, a 65-000-member, California-dreamin' chunk of Stern's outfit:

"If SEIU goes in the direction that Stern is currently leading it, it will become a business union movement, a service-type organization, as opposed to where were coming from. We want to build a real movement of workers, a real social movement union, for workers, by workers, where workers are encouraged and trained to be decision-making leaders."

More: http://labornotes.org/node/1547

So is Sal fightin' back? You bet. First he resigned from Andy's national "executive committee," and now "meetings of rank-and-file leaders... are starting to happen." At the union's national convention this May, Rosselli plans on "checking the authority of the president with member democracy."