Hope you’re all rested and fully recuperated from your holiday festivities. Looks like we have some heavy lifting to do, and it’s not clear to me that we’re going to get a lot of help from the institutional Democratic party. The fact is, we are going to have to push them to do the right thing at least as hard as we push the Republicans (a.k.a. our one-party state) not to do the wrong thing. Nothing new, right? Any time anything useful gets done in America, it’s because there’s an army of activists locking arms and pushing it forward. Progress doesn’t arrive in a sedan chair, eating sweetmeats; it’s dragged kicking and screaming every inch of the way. That’s what we’re looking at, once again, as we work to preserve the remnants of our social safety net, keep ourselves out of devastating overseas conflicts, and protect the most vulnerable among us.
The challenge this time around is being able to move fast enough to make a difference. The GOP-run Congress is going to ram a stack of legislation through over the next few weeks that will disable the ACA (so called “Obamacare”), cut back or restructure (privatize) Medicare and Medicaid, cut Social Security (perhaps privatize as well), and more. We need real-time information on specific legislation that’s being proposed, voted on, etc. Sourcing that will be crucial. We also need to organize on a local, Congressional district level, to apply pressure where it will have the greatest impact.
Some of the organizing work appears to already be in motion, at least as far as setting a template for activists to follow. There’s this new group called Indivisible (http://www.indivisibleguide.com/) that has assembled a kind of activist cookbook for lobbying individual representatives. The group that grew out of the Sanders campaign – Our Revolution – is also pulling some of this together, as well as more longstanding groups like MoveOn.org. I think that part of it is taking shape, but the information component is still a little sketchy. If anyone has any insights on how to get timely, detailed information on pending legislation, let me know (use the comments field on this post).
I hope to work with some neighbors on lobbying our new tea party Congressperson (most reactionary representative we’ve had in my lifetime, I believe). I strongly suggest you do the same. Start today. Aloha.
luv u,
jp
