What is the Nature of caucus99percent ?
Submitted by PriceRip on Mon, 04/24/2017 - 10:29am
Is this a community of neighbors or is it an agglomeration of individual bloggers? Or, is it a bit of both with enough of each to actually function as a community? I ask this question because it is not clear to me whether it would be possible to generate coherent community action here.
If this is a community, I would like to know how this Community Organizing Suggestion would be received. If this is an agglomeration, I will stop trying to herd the cats.
If none of this applies, then just ignore this, and have a good day.
Comments
Got me pricerip.....
I think we're just a bunch of amicable people with our own ideals and goals. I think we are all unique enough in our beings to be individuals that have broken from the herd, and we very much have that in common. I will be interesting to learn what the rest of the community thinks.
"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."--Napoleon
I think it's the latter in search of the former
On this site, I think we're . . .
. . . an agglomeration of individual bloggers. To organize community action -- or community at all -- I think you need to be face to face, preferably with good food and drink to sustain the energy. And I think both entities -- the website and the physical site(s) -- are necessary to make anything happen.
I'm completely with dym and Lookout. Meet in person is best.
If I had a place big enough I'd invite the whole C99 crew over to cook together, rabble rouse and plot the 99% uprising. But my small NYC apartment could probably only handle 8-10. The park across the street, on the other hand...could fit us all.
That said, an ideal plan, to me, would be a weekend somewhere in which there aren't a lot of expenses for folks, preferably the house or property of member who could host a few dozen people or so. We could spend the first day getting to know one another personally (two days for that would be even better), in order to get a better sense of folks' strengths and capabilities.
Then, as PriceRip suggests, out comes the drawing board easel with subjects/ideas collected from the day before. From there we put together placards to designate spots around the place where folks could go to start working groups. Taking this tangible work back to our home here, where we could tinker and perfect it, would be the way to go (of course, notwithstanding some of the things left better to in-person discussion).
This is a good and worthwhile conversation to be having at this point. Glad we're doing so.
"If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:
THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC"
- Kurt Vonnegut
@Mark from Queens I would love to do
I would love to do exactly this.
But two problems: 1) right now I have no living room or dining room furniture, so there's nowhere for people to sit. 2)I live in Florida. Which is kind of like living in Oregon or Washington St. Not exactly centrally located, are we!
"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha
"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver
yep, requires both
face-2-face and a C-99 website. This one will do until it becomes necessary to upgrade. Organize by congressional district, then region (if a big state), then State, then Region. Simple. Not easy, but is simple.
the little things you can do are more valuable than the giant things you can't! - @thanatokephaloides. On Twitter @wink1radio. (-2.1) All about building progressive media.
@dance you monster Agree with dym and
Agree with dym and gjohnsit.
"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha
"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver
Face to face is best
as dym suggest. However I do think we could brainstorm together online and develop ideas/goals. I've often thought this community would be a great place to paint an image of what amerika should/could be.
Ideally what should our country look/act like? After establishing goals we could also talk about how we might get there. It would be a fun exercise, but at the end would/could we create that change...I'm afraid it is too few too late.
That said, I for one would love to be a part of a discussion about what our country should be. Without goals there is rarely progress.
“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
I'm with Lookout.
"The “jumpers” reminded us that one day we will all face only one choice and that is how we will die, not how we will live." Chris Hedges on 9/11
This comment is guaranteed to be unpopular.
I've posted on politics since about 2004, on about ten or so boards, one board at a time. It's my impression that the great majority of posters are posters, not activists. Maybe some of the older posters were activists years ago, but no longer. Again, I am not saying none are activists now.
The real question for me is, does activism actually accomplish anything and, if so, what kind of activism? Without answers to these questions, we're likely to be spinning wheels.
When I pose a question like this, I usually hear about Vietnam. Whatever happened when Congress finally de-funded after maybe a dozen years of activism, that was about 50 years ago, during which time things have changed a lot. (In 2016, one poster asserted that activists had stopped a war in Syria. However, when I replied to that with the facts, the poster apologized to me, although, from my perspective, he certainly did not need to.) And correlation is not causation.
All that said, your question is about composing lists, right? That can be done online, even by non-activists. What category of list are you seeking?
Unpopular, Ha, That's my job and you can't have it.
That: " ... the great majority of posters are posters, not activists." is the source of my "is not clear to me whether" phrasing.
As for activism, I know it well and have been in small groups that have been very successful in many local situations for 35 years. It is very exhilarating to be involved with shutting down multimillion dollar projects. But as you imply with respect to the question of scaling such activities to a national level, I have no clue. I see Jane Kleeb doing some awesome regional organizing, but then I am in Nebraska the home (in many ways) to community organizing.
Sorry, I was editing as you were posting, so I will ask again:
You linked us to a post about lists. What kind of list were you seeking?
The above link is to a comment I
attached to an article written by Big Al. My comment points out that Big Al's article contains a list not too dissimilar to what I would expect to see at a community organizational meeting albeit with much more detail written into each bullet point. My comment is in response to Lootout's comment containing similarly detailed bullet points.
The structure of that interaction is very similar to what happens at community organizational meetings.
Community Organizing is not a trivial process. The question I keep asking myself is, "Is it possible to do this process on line?" If you brush up on the details you can see that some comments here address some of those issues. A lot of the answer to: "What can we do about ..." is addressed through the process of community organizing.
My wife is convinced, for a long list of reasons, that community organizing is impossible as an online process. The best we could do by this logic is to activate people as Bernie did during the primary. While this all may be true it is not clear to me because of the changing nature of communications as more people grow up with this technology.
My advice I steal from Nike: Just do it.
You are never going to know if it will work or not until you give it a shot. Instead of posting asking what kind of board this is, post asking for what you actually want, specifying exactly what that is. If you really want whatever Big Al articulated, boil it down to a sentence or three, rather than expecting people to read a long post the same way you did and then discern exactly what you want. (My very solid experience is that, if you really want something, you have to do as much as you can to make easy as possible for someone to accommodate you.)
On almost every board on which I've posted in the past has been a separate section for activism. (One one board, it was even broken down by national, state, local and precinct, but that was a much more well-trafficked board.) This board has no separate section for activism. So, I don't know how it will work here.
Again, if you are looking for things that can be accomplished, at least at first, by people sitting at their computers, a message board is a good place. Otherwise, I'm not sure. It's discouraging, but it's been my experience for as long as I've been posting.
ETA: Again, the question for me is outcomes. You were involved in activism that shut down multi-million dollar projects? Are you sure? (Again, correlation is not causation.) Do you mind saying how recently? Because there was a lot of juice behind shutting down Keystone. There was also a lot of national juice behind Medicare for All, or at least a strong public option, before we got Obamacare.
Again, I don't have any faith that our demonstrations, online petitions, calls to our alleged representatives have any effect at all these days, if ever they did. And you know what they say about one definition of insanity. It may be that we need to invent a different kind of activism. I don't know.
I am sure ...
"You were involved in activism that shut down multi-million dollar projects? Are you sure?"
the Lincoln Journal Star site is a pain so here is a wikipedia summery about the Nuclear Waste Dump (The Boyd County, Nebraska reference is not entirely accurate.). I really pissed off some people at UNK by being involved as an opponent to TPTB. A few actually tried to get me fired. Ah, the fun times we had.
Allan Jenkins wrote about the Midstate Irrigation Project as it was originally conceived. I am associated with the Lillian Annette Rowe Wildlife Sanctuary. When the new Rowe Sanctuary Director came to town I was the guy that showed him the extent of the Midstate Irrigation Project as it was modified in the 1980s. I got my little Hilux stuck in the mud so the director took that as an opportunity to meet the local farmers. Allan doesn't describe CPNRD's attempt to revive the project (in its abbreviated form) in the 1980s when we had to drive another stake through its heart, but by then he had moved on to other projects (my wife was one of his research assistants at that time).
I really don't care if you believe me because, Reality Is ...
I was not doubting your veracity. It's only
that people sometimes sincerely mistake correlation for causation. Actually, it's not so much that they mistake it as that they don't even consider it. They demonstrate for something and it happens, so they assume their demonstration was the reason it happened. Like the poster who told me demonstrations had changed Obama's mind about Syria back in 2013. https://caucus99percent.com/content/did-obama-draw-red-line-syrian-sand-...
I would trust your sincere belief in anything that you posted and would never assume intentional deceit on your part. Some posters are slippery, but I don't get that from your posts at all.
Sincerely Mistake Correlation for Causation
My "sincere belief" and "intentional deceit" are actually weasel words, but I don't take your statements personally because you apparently don't know me at all. Because if you actually knew me you would know that that your explanation is not quite up to snuff. So to help explain the situation I will write a short article describing how approximately 20 people killed a $400,000,000 project in south central Nebraska in the mid 1980s. How's that for being specific ... but as per usual I really don't care if you believe me and as always your mileage may vary.
While laughing my ass off while reading, "I would trust your sincere belief in anything that you posted and would never assume intentional deceit on your part." my wife was ROTFL at your "people sometimes sincerely mistake correlation for causation" comment saying, "Speak for yourself cowboy!" Now I now your are talking in general terms not directed at me personally but you did write those words in response to my comment so you will not take it personally as I point out how so very full of shit those words are in that context. But then again you don't actually know me so who the hell knows what you really mean. For more read my sig ...
Apparently, *you* don't know *me,*,which is
disappointing after all the essays and replies I have posted on this board.
Your subject line could not be more wrong. Neither of those terms is a weasel word. Nor did I intend them as such. I have no idea why you think they are.If I had posted something like "I seldom doubt your veracity," "seldom" would indeed have been a weasel word. Every modifier, however is not a "weasel word." Thinking using words like "sincere" and "genuine" while telling you I think you believe what you say is...well, I'm not sure I can find the right words.
"prickly" ?
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
Think Globally Act Locally
My favorite story involved the local PTB deciding it would be a good idea to convert a chunk of the city's premier park into an upscale indoor climate controlled sports center complete with swimming/diving pool. Big project, big prestige for the community, and sure we would include a "coupon program" for those not able to afford the fees, yea right!
The
promoterscity council hired a Seattle architect to determine that Harmon Park was the most central and convenient location for this project. Look at a map (with a proper scale) an note that "central and convenient" are rather irrelevant in Kearney, NE as opposed to using those terms in Seattle, WA.My personal favorite day (remember I was just one of a very large group): With council chambers packed and the council members (particularly the mayor) dragging their feet I had the pleasure of asking the mayor if he was taking bribe money or accepting some other form of compensation to build this facility for the country club set. You could have heard a pin drop. I am something of a lightning rod.
After a few more meetings and consulting with various stakeholders the council decided to pursue other options. So we now have a YMCA that was build on, what was at the time, the northern boundary of the city.
Very cool. Thanks.
@PriceRip well...most
well...most anecdotal evidence I've gotten from my own experiences and others would show that your wife is mostly right, UNLESS the actions people want to take are online actions; petitions, fundraising, or the wide world of hacking for a variety of good causes.
Online is great as a communications network or multiple bulletin boards linked together and operating at lightspeed, linking the communities of action in the enfleshed world. It's not so good as a place for making plans.
Even Occupy, which used online prodigiously, began because a bunch of people got together in real life, David Graeber among them, and made a plan to hold a protest of indeterminate length. They didn't make the plan online.
"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha
"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver
She's the knowledgable one of the team.
It drives her crazy because I don't describe the processes properly because community organizing and mobilizing are two different things.
On a local level I do things more like Bernie which is community mobilizing while my wife's temperament is more suited to community organizing.
We both like to get things done but my skills are better suited to influencing "in real time", tactical situations, if you will pardon the military allusion, and my wife is more the "long term" strategic thinker. We make a good team even if the difference of opinions generates a bit of noise from time to time ...
Any community organizing must start with "in real life" commitments. Me forcing some bureaucrat (academic or municipal) back into line or out of the game is a different kind of "organizing". I have more fun ...
It takes knocking on
doors. That's the activism part, and be it a political campaign or jump starting America 2.0, knocking on doors is where participation ends for many would-be activists. I personally hate it. But it beats the hell out of phone banking.
Your first door knocking round is simply to hand out a flier. "This is what we're doing, here's what we're about. I'll be back in a couple days to see if you're interested, or save me the trouble by sending an email with your address. Thanks! g'night... "
Next go 'round, give them more details, and info on the next Monthly Meetup where they can meet & greet others like them. Yes, monthly meetup. It's all about the pizza & beer monthly meetup. "Joe! Didn't think I would find you here! You're sick'n'tired of the Washington horse$h!t, too?!"
the little things you can do are more valuable than the giant things you can't! - @thanatokephaloides. On Twitter @wink1radio. (-2.1) All about building progressive media.
crickets?
well, that's why it takes so long.
the little things you can do are more valuable than the giant things you can't! - @thanatokephaloides. On Twitter @wink1radio. (-2.1) All about building progressive media.
I hear crickets often ... too often ...
Your philosophy, wink, is shared by Politics Reborn,
a local NYC group of former Bernie campaign folks, who have been the only ones I've encountered who seem to be moving in the right direction (admittedly, the name is not great). On the contrary the Our Revolution folks I met, early on just after the primary, seemed to too easily jettison their more progressive sense for a disturbing, uncritical support of Hillary in the general. Not my idea of revolution, at all.
Don't have the means to get round online on this IPad or I'd have linked to the here, but I'd encourage you and anyone interested to have a look. The last meeting I attended of theirs months ago they were outlining a similar strategy of going door to door canvassing our neighborhoods.
"If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:
THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC"
- Kurt Vonnegut
@HenryAWallace The real question for me
The real question for me is, does activism actually accomplish anything and, if so, what kind of activism? Without answers to these questions, we're likely to be spinning wheels.
Bingo.
"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha
"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver
I think it can be done.
There are clusters of us in some areas, but my impression is that we are pretty spread out around the country. But it only takes one person to carry an agreed upon message/idea/agenda to another group of people, either local people or another online group.
If we want to get other revolution/progressive type groups to coalesce around Big Al's idea, then having a lot of bloggers here is an advantage. We already have people very competent to reach out to other groups via their posts.
My own analogy
is similar to how I looked at our Peace vigil. I knew that our small group could not change the big picture alone, but I saw it as a way to educate people who only have the benefit of the narrative promoted by the main stream media.
In addition, I believe in social movements as a key to long term and real change. Social movements generally form organically in response to an issue(s). Occupy is a splendid example. Has Occupy changed the system yet? No, but most social movements are not instantly successful. I still believe we are in the next wave of Occupy which may take a different form than the original OWS.
The big problem is time is of the essence and I am not sure there is enough time left for a broad social movement to change things. That said, often change will appear to happen overnight when in reality it took a while for the tipping point to happen.
So what is our role in this? I see most of us as educators and messengers to prepare the rest of the population for participating in the next big social movement. Statistically, it only takes about 10% of a group to fully embrace a change in order for them to affect that change.
Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy
I think OWS impacted the system more than any
movement since the anti-Vietnam War movement. However, because the system is so well guarded, the "change" took the form of pretending to respond to OWS, rather than actually changing. Before OWS, the riff was "economic warfare never works" meaning the have nots were allegedly waging war against the rich (and they should stop because it was useless). After OWS, the riff was "We need to think about economic justice. Emphasis on think about. Lip service.
For example, Hillary hired 200 economic advisors for her 2015-16 Presidential campaign. Their role was not economic justice, however. It was how her campaign could appeal to those seeking economic justice without frightening the wealthy. I swear to you, one of the economists said something very close to that for publication, seemingly without the first clue of how awful it sounded to those seeking economic. And judging from what she sounded like before she got scared enough to start copying a few things from Bernie, those 200 economists should give her her money back.
Here is the tell: Bernie speaks of income inequality and wealth inequality. People who are only jerking our chains speak only of income inequality (as did the tone deaf economist I paraphrased above). No American politician is going to tell business how much it can or cannot pay its executives or start paying dishwashers or bus boys millions a year. So blathering about income inequality refers to the minimum wage. No matter how much you adjust that paltry sum, you are not going to achieve economic justice. And no one ever adjusts it enough or fast enough even to keep up with the cost of living anyway, much less enough to pass for economic justice.
It is what it is.
Read some interesting stuff, post some interesting stuff. Expect nothing more.
We wanted decent healthcare, a living wage and free college.
The Democrats gave us Biden and war instead.
@Azazello Rather than expectation,
Rather than expectation, I'd aim for experimentation.
"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha
"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver
Suggest asking Jtc to pin Big Al's essay
So that it stays visible for a day or two, giving more people a chance to see it. And then let's roll. I'm not a writer and I'm a slow thinker, but I will Do for this to the best of my abilities.
Blogs are the modern day gossip groups
They spread words like hair on fire if lucky, that's about it, in my opinion. Word-spreading is what social media is good for, except the lies, the censorship, the hidden algorithms, and the corrupt advertisers making profit for the oligarchy. Other than that it's good. There is no escaping "the cloud" apparently, every packet needs cache according to the sniffer on my LAN.
What's the psychology behind "voting" or "recommending" words on a blog? I'm not interested in being herded one way or another, I'm interested in thinking for myself, which is damn near impossible online. Constant stream of people asking and telling you what to think, just like TV was. Except now when I turn it off, the nightmare outside is real, there is no relief from the collapsing system around me. People stream by with their faces glued to a "phone", as if they'd disappear without it. Not my kind of technology anymore, but go on. Thanks.
As an English major, I go back to the way we describe ourselves
in words. What are the metaphors we use for ourselves?
Caucus
Lifeboat
99%
The image I get from conflating all three of those is: everybody who isn't elite is welcome, we're in a small and possibly temporarily safe place--in that we're not actively drowning while we're here--and we agree on most policy matters while disagreeing, and arguing actively, about tactics and strategy.
Thing is, at some point, the lifeboat has to be able to take you to an island where you can survive--and possibly get rejiggered into being a ferryboat or coast guard cutter that goes around trying to fish people out of the drink and get them to dry land (if they want to come, that is).
"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha
"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver
Sorry for the late reply but your comment
was (is) the best summary of the c99 condition. If or when we should build our numbers, the overall strength of our message about goals will resonate. The difficulty is with means. Change cannot be accomplished within the democratic party. Revolution, when it comes, will be violent--else the elite will never relinquish their stranglehold on the rest on humankind.
Let me amend that statement: if we are still alive, revolution will be violent.