US Politics

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Wisconsin! in one week, tens of thousands of workers and their families have made history. In the face of the most aggressive anti-worker bill in modern history, teachers, janitors, clerks, plumbers, steelworkers, teamsters and many more have stood together above party lines and pushed union leaders and politicians where they weren’t willing to go. Rank-and-file workers, students and grassroots activists have led the way and the establishment has only moved because we fought to get here. With a vote on the bill coming soon, we have to stick to our guns and keep our eyes on the prize!

The budget crisis is a fraud. As the Cap Times points out, Walker took a $121.4 million surplus and turned it into a deficit with “$140 million in new spending for special-interest groups in January. If the Legislature were simply to rescind Walker’s new spending schemes the ‘crisis’ would not exist.”

We know that when cities and states come up short its because Wall Street banks stole our money, we’re in two trillion-dollar wars and because the wealthy don’t pay their share. Two-thirds of Wisconsin corporations pay zero taxes!

There likely has been no issue more debated by the left and anti-war progressives in the last months than the Dream Act. The act would allow conditional residency and a path to legalization for thousands of young people - including thousands of current students - who arrived in the US before the age of 16 and complete two years of higher education or military service. Although there has been organizing around the issue for years, it wasn't until relatively recently (the past two years) that the activism around the Dream Act became known to many mainstream politicians and organizations but most importantly, to thousands of young immigrants.

President Obama and the Congressional Democrats have been stern in their condemnations of BP. Yet their responses to the greatest environmental catastrophe in U.S. history show the Democratic Party’s unwillingness to challenge not only the logic of private profitability, but also the short-term prerogatives of corporate interests.

The President’s June 15 Oval Office address met a wide array of critics. Some questioned his lack of specificity, others the tardiness of his response. But Obama is operating within a box of his own construction. Out of deference to private property and corporate power, he will not entertain discussion of seizing BP’s assets to guarantee that all those harmed are made whole and that the Gulf is cleaned. The $20 billion dollar fund Obama got BP to agree to will not likely come close to what will eventually be needed. The logic of his pro-corporate agenda reduces his options in dealing with even a rogue corporation.

When addressing the important question of scale--"how big or broad do we really need to be in order to start calling some shots in a meaningful way"--some of us on the left are fond of approvingly paraphrasing Lenin's idea that "politics is millions." ["Politics begin where millions of men and women are; where there are not thousands, but millions."]

This is a truism that few would contest, but it's also a good reminder of the real mammoth task at hand. Before we can realize the "another world" that so many will be imagining in Detroit next week, we have to think about what it will take to get there. When I think about this, I envision millions of people who identify with social movements and are directly engaged by them. We would be able to recognize this phenomenon in the conversations of strangers at a bar, the lyrics of pop songs, a politicization of sports, and so on. These people are from all walks of life and carry eclectic, diverse, and often contradictory political positions. The left is there, but only as a midwife to the struggle--leading by example and careful not to undermine its influence by mandating political orthodoxy on an array of points for every campaign or by exhibiting insensitivity to cultural and religious traditions that may have reactionary elements about them (as well as radical potential, in some cases).

I recently attended an event at Bluestockings organized by the Rock Dove Collective, which coordinates a network of radical health practitioners who