Maybe it's up to us: People Power Pushed the New Deal

[Karmadillo]

I think, unfortunately, there are substantial differences between FDR and Obama. FDR seemed much more open, campaign rhetoric to the contrary, to change. Still, I think the article posted below points us in the right direction. It's up to us to organize for what we want: jobs, universal health care, an end to wars of aggression, a decent education for all, and a global warming policy that confronts the problem instead of kicking it down the road (OK, that's what I want, but I'm assuming we're all pretty much in agreement around here even though we have some strong differences on the Obama Administration and on the reliability of the Democrats).

What strikes me as strange about the article is how passive we've become. It wasn't forty years ago that Americans in large numbers took to the streets to try to end a criminal war in Vietnam. Today, we type on the internet, we howl at Fox News, we go to work, we consume, we work ourselves into a frenzy every four years only to be disappointed with the results regardless of the winning party, but we do not, at least not in the numbers necessary, organize to bring our will to bear on the government. We even let one of the dumbest people ever to run for President steal the 2000 election because who were we to rock the boat and shut down Washington DC until we had a fair count?

The Democrats, as much as I'm conditioned by my beliefs to want to say otherwise, are not going to deliver us. They are not going to take the necessary steps to reverse global warming even if it means your kids are going to suffer privations beyond anything one can imagine. They are not going to give us single payer even though it is clear beyond a doubt that would be the best solution to the nightmare of an expensive, inadequate health care system. They are not going to reform our schools so that they meet the needs of the children whose only hope of a good life is education. And they are not going to stop blowing our money on Oil/Terror Wars. They dance to the tune played by their Corporate Masters and it doesn't take Noam Chomsky to tell us that. The evidence is pushed in our face every day.

So, maybe it's time for our own color revolution, a red white and blue one where we take an active part in the governance of this country beyond making internet contributions and leafleting for the politicians who inevitably betray our concerns for those of their more powerful, better financed supporters. Even though we lack the experience of direct protest and maybe even lack the belief it will work, I can't think of any other path. If we make the demands, if we make the threats, if we take to the streets in massive numbers to express our will, if we make it clear the midterm elections are about the American People and not about Wall Street, the leadership, whether the Kucinich/Wellstone Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party or the centrist Obama/Clinton Wing of the Democratic Party, will respond. If we don't, we will spend the rest of our lives in a declining country, waiting for a "leader" to rise up and deliever us from our cowardice. And history suggests someone will arise to deliver us, but it won't be in a way anything like the way we want to be delivered.

We need to relearn the ways of organizing and protesting. Those who came before us created unions from scratch. They ended slavery. They fought racism. They fought sexism. They brought environmental protection to a world corporate polluters saw as their own private cesspool. They gave us social security. They gave us, admittedly inadequate, support for the impoverished. They did a heck of a lot better than we've done. We need to rediscover that path. We need to rediscover that courage. America and the World need us to put away the illusions that keep us passive.

And to bring this to an end (those few of you still reading can sigh your relief), I'll draw on an example of the wisdom and inspiration that can help sustain us through this fight. As Mario Savio said:

There comes 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 all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop, And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, the people who own it, that unless you're free the machine will be prevented from working at all." (1964)

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/06/22-5

Published on Monday, June 22, 2009 by YES! Magazine
People Power Pushed the New Deal
by Sarah Anderson

During the Great Depression, my grandfather ran a butter creamery in rural Minnesota. Growing up, I heard how a group of farmers stormed in one day and threatened to burn the place down if he didn’t stop production. I had no idea who those farmers were or why they had done that—it was just a colorful story.

Now I know that they were with the Farmers’ Holiday Association, a protest movement that flourished in the Midwest in 1932 and 1933. They were best known for organizing “penny auctions,” where hundreds of farmers would show up at a foreclosure sale, intimidate potential bidders, buy the farm themselves for a pittance, and return it to the original owner.

The action in my grandfather’s creamery was part of a withholding strike. By choking off delivery and processing of food, the Farmers’ Holiday Association aimed to boost pressure for legislation to ensure that farmers would make a reasonable profit for their goods. Prices were so low that farmers were dumping milk and burning corn for fuel or leaving it in the field.

The Farmers’ Holiday Association never got the legislation it wanted, but its direct actions lit a fire under politicians. Several governors and then Congress passed moratoriums on farm foreclosures. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, telling advisors that he feared an “agrarian revolution,” rushed through reforms that helped millions of farmers stay on their land. These new policies regulated how much land was planted or kept in reserve. Although it was eventually replaced by the massive subsidies that today favor large agribusiness and encourage overproduction, Roosevelt’s original program supported some of the most prosperous and stable decades for U.S. farmers.

This is just one example of how strong grassroots organizing during the last severe U.S. economic crisis was key in pushing some of that era’s most important progressive reforms. Social Security is another such case.

The Depression had been particularly tough on the elderly, millions of whom lost their pensions in the stock crash and had few options for employment. Roosevelt, however, felt the nation was not ready for a costly and logistically challenging pension program.

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[zeemike]

1. They have nullified the power of protest by making it normal

And they know there is no unifying thing as long as there are protest for this and protest for that.
Now everyone has a protest even the tea baggers are now normal behaviour...so why give it a thought.
They have us divided up and we don't seem to know it.

[Karmadillo]

2. I don't think it would take long for us to turn that around.If

we put 1,000,000 in DC with satellite protests around the country, we would be able to put single-payer on the agenda. Politicians already on our side would be emboldened to speak up more loudly. Those on the fence would start silently calculating midterm vote totals and consider the possibility their interests lay with us and not those who have paid for them.

[zeemike]

3. The operative word is if.

And what prevents that from happening?
It is not like there are not a million people fed up with the way things are.
The shotgun approach we are now doing is not working obviously.

[Karmadillo]

4. Maybe we need more effective grassroots organizations that focus on

getting us into the streets when necessary. We could also work through those organizations to get something for our votes. If liberals were to withhold their votes from every Democrat who didn't support single payer, my guess is we'd stand a much better chance of ending up with single payer. Again, I don't have a blueprint, but I think that's maybe the direction we need to go. Focusing most of our efforts and money on getting specific centrist Democrats elected doesn't seem to be paying off.

[zeemike]

7. No it i s not paying off.

Because they will be corrupted by the system...at least most of them.
There was a movie made some years ago staring Eddy Murphy called "The Distinguished Gentleman" that showed just how that happens.
Our only hope to changes this system to to get the money out of politics. And i am afraid that the only way we will do that is to demand fundamental chang and accept noting less.

[Downtown Hound]

5. We need more protests

As well as more civil disobedience. Protests are great and they can influence, but unless you actually make the powers that be uncomfortable then they can always find ways to ignore you. I'd like to see one million march on Washington, and 10,000 of them get arrested for non-violent civil disobedience. The sheer logistics of them having to deal with that would be more than enough to make them blink.

[Karmadillo]

6. I think you're right. And if we got into the habit of taking to the streets,

it wouldn't seem like such an overwhelming thing. When we wanted something on the order of single payer or intelligent environmental policies, we would begin our efforts with the understanding we might have to join with hundreds of thousands or millions of others to make sure OUR representatives knew not to put the interests of their Corporate Masters ahead of our own. And if we reinforced our marches and our civil disobedience with concerted action at the ballot box, OUR representatives might abandon their Corporate Masters altogether.

[Downtown Hound]

11. My thoughts exactly

Progressives have been stuck between a rock and a hard place for a long time.We are unable to vote for any real third party candidate because it splits the Democratic vote and allows the Republican to get elected. So we're forced to compromise or abandon our principles in an attempt to keep the real crazies out of office.

I think it's going to take a real movement to change this. People need to get out into the streets, and they need to be willing to take a few risks. Revolution is never easy, and we all have to make sacrifices. Until we do that, we will always have the corporations breathing down our necks.

[Cal33]

8. Yes, it's DEFINITELY up to us, PEOPLE POWER, to get

things done. I'm giving my view in the thread below "National Disease: Sociopaths in High Places," of how
this whole nation of ours is being run by relatively few, but sick and very ambitious people, who should not
be holding the high positions they do. Right now I'm on the same page, some twenty lines below.

[struggle4progress]

9. People power has to mean more than mere protest: it must mean tracking local, state,

and federal legislation; it must mean pressuring officials at all levels; it must mean going after advertisers whose money supports rightwing messages; it must mean following regulators; it must mean organizing in the workplace; it must mean actually putting people in money to understand and confront the forces that control their lives

If we don't actually understand the local and state power structures in detail -- what corporations are buying our politicians and so on -- there's no hope of winning real fights

[Karmadillo]

10. Examples of the Role of Protest and Civil Disobedience in Democracy

It's not like embracing protest and civil disobedience would be a break with the past. Reform depends on our creating sufficient pressure to force change.

http://www.civilliberties.org/sum98role.html

The Role of Civil Disobedience in Democracy
...by Kayla Starr, adapted by Bonnie Blackberry

Civil Disobedience is the act of disobeying a law on grounds of moral or political principle. It is an attempt to influence society to accept a dissenting point of view. Although it usually uses tactics of nonviolence, it is more than mere passive resistance since it often takes active forms such as illegal street demonstrations or peaceful occupations of premises. The classic treatise on this topic is Henry David Thoreau's "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience," which states that when a person's conscience and the laws clash, that person must follow his or her conscience. The stress on personal conscience and on the need to act now rather than to wait for legal change are recurring elements in civil disobedience movements. The U.S. Bill of Rights asserts that the authority of a government is derived from the consent of the governed, and whenever any form of government becomes destructive, it is the right and duty of the people to alter or abolish it.

Throughout the history of the U.S., civil disobedience has played a significant role in many of the social reforms that we all take for granted today. Some of the most well known of these are:

1) The Boston Tea Party -- citizens of the colony of Massachusetts trespassed on a British ship and threw its cargo (tea from England) overboard, rather than be forced to pay taxes without representation to Britain. This was one of the many acts of civil disobedience leading to the War for Independence, establishing the United States of America as a sovereign state.

2) Anti-war movements have been a part of U.S. history since Thoreau went to jail for refusing to participate in the U.S. war against Mexico in 1849. More recent examples were the nationwide protests against the war in Viet Nam, U.S. involvement in Nicaragua and Central America, and the Gulf War. Actions have included refusal to pay for war, refusal to enlist in the military, occupation of draft centers, sit-ins, blockades, peace camps, and refusal to allow military recruiters on high school and college campuses.

3) The Women's Suffrage Movement lasted from 1848 until 1920, when thousands of courageous women marched in the streets, endured hunger strikes, and submitted to arrest and jail in order to gain the right to vote.

4) Abolition of slavery -- including Harriet Tubman's underground railway, giving sanctuary, and other actions which helped to end slavery.

5) The introduction of labor laws and unions. Sit-down strikes organized by the IWW, and CIO free speech confrontations led to the eradication of child labor and improved working conditions, established the 40-hour work week and improved job security and benefits.

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