Welcome To Social Unrest 2

I have written a number of blogs about Social Unrest, SU. Harking back to the 1930s we marched for Unemployment Insurance, Social Security, Home Relief, Minimum Wage and the right to organize unions. With F.D.R.s help we achieved it and the New Deal was born. That’s how we dealt with SU back then. Now, seventy years later we are confronted with yet another economic crisis. 25 Million unemployed. A large proportion are college graduates with huge school debts and no jobs in sight. The GOP threatening to pay for the crisis by repealing the New DeaL Once again making the majority of working people pay for the mistakes of the money speculators. For President Obama looking at election day 2012 this could be the make or break situation.

Since Obama’s election I have thought that without a mass movement behind him to create a fight against the right wing we were going nowhere's. Yupp I turned out to be on target. But, look a here? We have this budding new anti Wall Street protesters taking over Zuccotti Park as a base for their fight against the “Money Changers.” Here comes the SU and it’s spreading across the country. Great, God I wish I could join them. (My old legs are beginning to give up even as I keep pushing them.) How did this SU happen?

For years now I have been decrying the absence of any organized left in the US that would be a countervailing force against the Tea Party GOP right wing. Low and behold. I simply don’t understand how Cyberspace can be used as an organizing tool. I’m stuck in this old fashioned notion that you got have a meeting of concerned people to organize a demonstration. They come up with the major slogans of the movement. This is not at all like that. Still not sure how it works. It seems that a bunch of people busy Twittering, Tweeting and Face-booking can manage to all show up at an agreed time and place. They make up their own signs, create demands on the spot, create theater, sing songs and if needs-be take on the police.

However, I admit that when they finally breakthrough on the Evening News I’m exclaiming, “Hooray but what are their demands?” I am told that I don’t understand this new kind of protest. The demands will emerge as people gather and discuss the issues. That sounds fine and I hope it happens. Yet I worry that the issues may be come clouded when they need to be very clear if we are looking for mass support. I like. “JOBS IS A BASIC RIGHT”” “DEMOCRACY MEANS FULL EMPLOYMENT” “TAX THE RICH ONE PERCENT.” “THEY OWN THE COUNTRY” WE ARE THE 99 %” “WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO FAIRNESS?” “JAIL FOR THE WALL STREET BONUS CROOKS.”

Okay, so You see I’m from an old school style of organizing. If you get your demands right they will show up. That’s how we organized all those great unions back in the 20th Century. The slogans came from careful listening to the people you were organizing. What was on their minds and how do we express it. In Madison Wisconsin and in Ohio they were handed the issues by the GOP State leadership who simply said, “the unions are dead we are not going to recognize them anymore.” Okay, that’s easy. “PROTECT OUR RIGHT TO COLLECTIVE BARGAINING.”

I Am anxious to see how this new style mass organizing action works out? I don’t want to connect it to “The Arab Spring.” I really don’t believe that’s going anywhere's because there is no clear cut way for those demonstrators to press their demands. In the US there is the looming Presidential election and that’s what this hubbub is about. Yes, my regular readers remember I said when push comes to shove on election day 2012 faced with the GOP crazy ideas of wiping out the New Deal we on the left will vote for Obama. I hope the independents will too. The lesser evil. Yes of course. “We did it before and we will do it again.” Old WW2 song. My best RS