The ANSWER LA Community Meeting yesterday, “Unite to Defeat the Bush Program”, drew speakers and participants from many coalitions, and was both a planning session and a meeting to build for the larger People’s Assembly, Community Fair and Rally to be held in Pershing Square on May 21.
It was good to be there and help organize it. I’d been slightly out of touch with ANSWER and the Movement for a couple of weeks due to business commitments. When you’re plugged into the Movement like I usually am, then get away from it, there’s a void. Things seem less hopeful. When you’re in the thick of things, organizing events, you are more optimistic because you are a part of those who are actively opposing the insane policies of this country. ANSWER, through the dozens of major national protests it has organized, has had an impact on the Movement, on that amorphous mass called the Left, and on society at large. It’s also about the hardest-working, smartest group of people I’ve ever been involved with. Commited too. The ANSWER anti-imperialist message, a core belief, is never wavered from regardless of the political cost, and ANSWER has successfully gotten their anti-imperialist message out to the hundreds of thousands who have attended antiwar rallies and to millions more via the media.
The nuclear option is about to to be played in DC
The Senate is careening toward a showdown over federal judges that poses enormous political risks for Republicans and Democrats. But neither side seems willing or able to stop it.
The Democrats may finally have found at least of few of their missing vertebra and appear willing to finally oppose the neocons and Bush in what looks to be a congressional death match. Sometimes compromise is not possible, and this is one of them. The splits and divisions so obvious in the rest of the country have now reached the Senate.
All of which is an organizing oportunity. Insane wars are bankrupting the country. The budget and trade deficits are out of control and ever expanding. The neocons have launched a deliberate attack to destroy Social Security and Medicaid and the rest of the social net. The infrastructure is eroding because the money is going towards wars instead. There’s a sense things are falling apart, and also somehow building to a showdown and pivot point. At times like those, people get in the streets, and do so in huge numbers. It happened in the 30’s. It could happen again.
Organizers need to be organized and ready when that time comes.