Stop Me Before I Vote Again

El sueño de la razón.

"It is noteworthy, for example, that both American "liberals" and American "conservatives" postulate a vanished Golden Age, an America that we need to "take back""

Yes, the vanished golden age of American Progressivism, when folks like Williams Jennings Brian were actually serious candidates for President.

http://projects.vassar.edu/1896/bryan.html

But about that same time the "real America" was showing what is really all about.

http://www.lastoftheindependents.com/wounded.htm

As George Carlin used to say, it's called the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.

This post was rejected a while ago, let's see if it works this time.

"It is noteworthy, for example, that both American "liberals" and American "conservatives" postulate a vanished Golden Age, an America that we need to "take back""

Yes, the vanished golden age of American Progressivism, when folks like Williams Jennings Brian were actually serious candidates for President.

http://projects.vassar.edu/1896/bryan.html

But about that same time the "real America" was showing what is really all about.

http://www.lastoftheindependents.com/wounded.htm

Wisconsin

Ding!

provided inspiration for the effort by Van Jones

Ding ding!

and others to launch the American Dream Movement.

Ding ding ding!

Jones, the founder of Green For All, joined MoveOn.org,

Ding ding ding ding!

the Center for Community Change, the Campaign for America’s Future ... to build an initiative....

Ding ding ding ding dingggg! We have a winner!

Y'know, I'll bet I could create a drinking game based on the phrase "American Dream"... and a set of Bullshit Bingo cards based on every name and organization mentioned in that Nation column -- oh, yeah, and the word "initiative".

Got news for ya, Kat: there is already a Time for our times. It's the Drudge Report.

D'oohhhhhhhh. You're fuckin' cold, Smiff.

But she should give heart: There's always Life.

Must be some visceral drive that impels the likes of vanden Drivel or our special friend Harris-Perry-whatever to trot out such desperate-sounding gruel. Are they fearful that they're losing 'four more years' of encysting within the bureaucracy like their Movement counterparts have so successfully done?

Someone somewhere raised the specter of Bachman/Palin slashfic. Equally appropriate might be Katrina/Melissa slashfic. Both would require a writer/writers with the sensitivities that derive from having all due respect for the great American traditions that inform the spectacle.

@Sandwichman: What is this 'Reason' of which you speak?

They're looking for Grendel, but they keep stumbling upon Elmer Fudd.

Pandar populism

Is for the merit class elements that want to
" roll in it"

As my dogs "roll in it"
It's
to counter their smell to their prey

In this case the prey are students and bohos
That as yet have failed to get comfortable around elite technoliberals

The American dream is a condescension

Real skill deprived kulack tadpoles caught in mid McJob trot
May want to start a business
Maybe a shop or restaurant
or think about retiring early
to some place warm and breezy

We could get uncle to fund a million bad ideas per year

Yes one million bad ideas
The people have to hatch

Not high tech not even just
Junior high tech

Any idea
Set up categories ...

To participate you simply send in a proposal
It gets pigeon holed in one or other category box
And you await lottery results
that occur every month

Cost to uncle ? Maybe 200 billion per annum

Consider this

Instead of pissing uncle's free money away on schooling grants etc

Let folks start up somethin'

Economics suggests it's no worse then upping transfers

The last thing mcshitnik jobsters want is to parade around as mcshitniks

They are wage workers only by necessity
To run a register at sears is not an honorable trade eh?
Not like being say a carpenter or a cow puncher

Want to approach this mcscrambled majority ?

Offer them the fun equivalent of guerrilla war

job site organizing is like paint ball for non nerds

Rule one
take heavy casualties

Hundreds of thousands fired for organizing
Is a minimum if we want to get a few blazes going here

Have you looked at the numbers?

Pitful

No one gets fired for job site insightments these days

Hey I've had 5 jobs in ten years and I'm old

anyone clever enough to organize can get hooked into a next job

Now is the season
Hop a job at the mall's biggest box and raise Hell

Owen,

That's not going to be good for your vision of the future, that "taking casualties."

It's going to mean a bunch of pissed and hungry people who are amenable to harsh measures and scapegoating.

Especially if there's no way to actually feed the people you've apparat'd into hunger and homelessness.

KVH is also responsible for downgrading Alex Cockburn's biweekly column in favor of inflicting more thoughts from Melissa Harris-Perry (formerly known as Melissa Harris-Lacewell).

@sk - I did remember the 'Lacewell' long after I'd posted but thought, "What hay?" I blame everything on the brain damage.

It's worse than that sk. Alex downgraded to monthly.

Still, good to hear Alex is chirpy as ever (and capable of provoking those who suffer shortness of breath when "AGW" is mentioned ;)

Crow

The jobakazi
Are. Picked from
Those class elements without
Dependents and partners
Old and young

You're point is often heard among pie cards
Its bs
It takes a breed
But plenty exist

The unions are alibi ing inaction

Btw have you done job. Orging ?

Owen,

Any chance you can put that into common idiom? Especially since we probably speak the same dialect of yankee English, and I'd have a clue what you were trying to communicate.

What threw you?

Jobokazi
Or pie card

The first oughta be obvious
the second is a nice name for union leadership

there are motions within the broader jobster liberation movement
That face the task ahead without obvious prejudice , illusions or pessimism

The dialogue is marginal to organized labor itself
Though somehow union backing must be arranged

One obstacle beyond the complacency of the local barons
Is the threat of non legal methods to a legit unions finical status

Much is pre emptied by the legal department
More even then by contempt for the will and fortitude of the still unorganized

In protracted struggles union backing can vanish if a deal for even
A fraction of the loaf can be arranged
with corporate management

The dues hounding implies is no more immoral then it is incomprehensible

To succeed the social activists working to org the unorganized
Need to find avenues of struggle that deal in the unions not deal em out

This requires sequencing

The pie cards won't turn down a dues stream
Okay how do we arrange that for em while retaining the initiative in our own hands

The evolving strategy seems to require an inside/outside structure

based among individual organizers inside unions and community and job class organizers outside the unions

The best paradigms seems to pre date the wagner act/CIO late 30's

The long pre history of industrial unionization

Jack Crow sez on 09.24.11 @14:45:
That's not going to be good for your vision of the future, that "taking casualties."

It's going to mean a bunch of pissed and hungry people who are amenable to harsh measures and scapegoating.

Not necessarily. You're not taking into account the fact that these pissed-off hungry people could still be reached by follow-up education and information efforts by labor activists, nor that a large number of said pissed-off hungry people will already have enough sense to not fall for the harshness and scapegoating, and to know who their real enemies are, and basically "know the score".

I think the key here will be that the education/info effort needs to be spearheaded by actual workers themselves -- not a bunch of suit'n'tie mainstream union officials, nor the Democratic Party, nor a bunch of effete white liberal vegan college brats.

Op sez on 09.25.11 @10:29:
To succeed the social activists working to org the unorganized
Need to find avenues of struggle that deal in the unions not deal em out...

I hate to say this, but I wouldn't trust the established mainstream unions as far as I can throw 'em these days, as they all seem to have been thoroughly defanged and castrated by the Democratic Party. The exceptions that prove the rule -- as far as I could tell -- were the Steelworkers joining the anarchists at the Seattle WTO in '99, and the Longshoremen refusing to load shipments of war materiel and fighting the cops in San Francisco in '03 -- and even then, they were acting independently, not under the direction of their unions' "leadership".

Imho, our best hope -- a long shot, I'll admit -- would be large-scale revival of the IWW. We need another Joe Hill, another Sacco'n'Vanzetti, and another Eugene Debs or two to win this one. The old mainstream AFL-CIA-type geezers are only getting in the way. All they'd do is suck up all the new movements' energy and divert it into propping up the Democratic Party.

KvH appears to have learned her craft from the Working Assets copy writing staff.

I hear ya mike and crow for that matter
But I'll re iterate some fragment of the unions must be at the table
As they were in the CIO break out

One big union is a confusion of the necessary solidarity of the social union movement for the basic unit of organization