A Powerful Spring for the 99% - What do you think?

While I was excited to hear of the initiative, labor and leadership in social movement organizations across the spectrum - peace, women's, environmental, legal, civil rights, you name it - need to be thinking and acting with a long-term perspective and on the basis of a deeper strategic vision. This primarily means thinking about ecological implications. People on the established and diminishing Left are not paying attention to ecological indicators and research: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/06/07-3. Simply put, the Left in this country needs to politically adapt to new ecological conditions. There will be little use for labor unions if the agricultural and thus economic system as a whole collapses. Civil society in the U.S. must quickly form some kind of grand and tremendously aggressive and well-organized coalition committee to propose and fight for those policies that might give humanity a fighting chance of preventing its own extinction. There are numerous policy plans, see Lester Brown's World on the Edge, Gilding and Randers "One-Degree War Plan," etc. People of conscience need to start thinking, acting, and organizing in a far more urgent and aggressive way.

I think, generally, the work of JwJ is necessary and good. The issues covered in this email are excellent. But, I have some problems with the idea of JwJ organizing a 99% coalition that seems to have developed out of the Occupy Movement, but has somewhat of a different purpose. I fear that there is the possibility of efforts to coopt the movement by some members of the coalition. I hope I'm wrong.

"This spring has been unprecedented" your tagline states, yet we just saw the Walker Recall effort defeated and contracted pensions for public workers in San Diego taken away at the ballot box. Millions of people are engaged in various levels of economic and social justice activity yet there is not a unified and coherent movement that can consistently challenge corporate power. Occupy!, building on the massive Wisconsin civil disobedience effort, which in turn was inspired by the Arab Spring, was able to change -- for a time anyway -- the national narrative that blamed our economic malaise on government deficits and public sector unions. The 99%-1% frame, the focus on Wall Street, and the occupation of public (and sometimes private) space went mainstream. But we still lack a strategy or set of strategies for building a movement. Our default strategy is to elect politicians who are not quite as bad as the bad guys. That only works when there are organized forces that can wield enough power to force the slightly better pols to enact reforms.

We need short term and long term strategies. We need inside and outside strategies. We need organizing and mobilizing. We need messaging and education that goes deeper than handing constituents our analysis and expecting them to march to our commands. We need to make the road as we walk, constructing social and economic enterprises that reflect human rather than corporate values. We need to practice democracy, check our privilege, and be open to creativity and difference. Another world is possible; we need to spend time to figure out how to get there.

We need to start putting the heat (newspapers, radio, internet, blogs, etc) on politicians, especially progressive democratic senators and congress people, and let them know that if they don't work with Occupy, and the 99%, that we will do our best to get someone in their office who will work with us. We have got to make the political support of the Occupy, and 99% Movements as important to their political well being and futures as do the lobbyists from the Wall Street corporations that have them cornered right now. We have to create the opportunity for our elected leaders to jump ship on the 1%, and that opportunity better be good!. We can point out all of the issues we want to our elected officials, but if they have no reason to listen to anyone but Wall Street, that is all they will hear. We also need to infiltrate Washington with folks who understand what we are trying to accomplish and who are sympathetic to our cause.