"No discernible difference" between Obama and Romney in many issues, Greenwald says

[patrice]

18. There were a bunch of us around MoveOn who began to worry about an influx of "peace"

activists as these last 2 wars started going bad. You'd hear them in the conference calls and could pretty well guess their level of understanding and length of commitment to peace/social-justice issues, but there were a bunch of them coming into the movement and they tended to be active in local politics, soooo . . .

Then I started running into some similar types near the end of the health care debate, there was at least one well-connected person who had attached herself to the Greens and was part of that kind of, part of it enough to be quite presumptuous and demanding of connections from OTHER people's contacts, REALLY clue-less or avoiding the actual in the trenches work of low-level organizing, NOT good with the leftier med-school students, who suddenly became this big MTA leader. I remember when she announced the change at a Green meeting. The Green leader was stunned. I was not, but I was furious, haven't had that much to do actively with the Greens ever since, for allowing themselves to get used that way.

Anyway, later, around our Occupy, the tension between the younger in-the-trenches student-activists and this MTA lady-leader (plus tons of Libertarians and Anarchists of various types that were around) was so thick it paralyzed us and caused the younger leftier crowd to just work with themselves and the rightier crowd to party hardy and showboat against local anti-racist efforts in the metro. It was a very confusing time, but later on, on FaceBook, I picked up on the MoveOn connections in the group, some of whom were some extremely MoveOn committed people I know and most of that stuff centered around MTA, but it was also pretty cold to or outright hostile toward the labor types amongst us, especially the poorer unions, and except for a couple of connections to some of the wealthiest unions in the region, who were also at least friendly with a local young (techie) Mormon leader, who may really just have been trying to get to know them better. Anyhow, that MoveOn contingent, through the agency of the ex-"health"-"care" reform activist, turned MTA advocate, made very consistent and strong proposals to basically take over the whole group/Occupy. Showed up at practically every big public thing we did with HUGE banners, making our poor Occupy look more like MTA than like an Occupy.