As the demonstrations on Wall Street this past weekend showed, there's a big difference between protesting for a purpose and making noise for its own sake.
(Flickr/Carwil)Protesters from Occupy Wall Street march on Church Street in Manhattan.
This weekend, the Occupy Wall Street protest in New York City's financial district reached a fevered pitch. Police arrested more than 80 protesters, and video evidence emerged appearing to show a New York Police Department officer indiscriminately spraying a group of protesters with mace. But according to some, the protest was more show than substance. In a New York Times write-up describing the mostly white young protesters wearing mainly black clothes, Ginia Bellafante writes:
The group's lack of cohesion and its apparent wish to pantomime progressivism rather than practice it knowledgably is unsettling in the face of the challenges so many of its generation face.
Today, voters in six districts in Wisconsin will try to flip the state Senate from Republican to Democrat in response to Governor Scott Walker's successful bid to strip public workers of collective-bargaining rights. Throughout the day, the Prospect will be aggregating get-out-the-vote efforts. We've also included recaps of the six elections -- including polling numbers -- below. For live coverage of the events and results as the votes start to be tallied, Follow @theprospect
Wisconsinites head to the polls tomorrow for recall elections in six state senate districts. These elections (and two next week) will determine whether Governor Scott Walker will retain a Republican state senate majority, and will also gauge the likelihood that he'll face his own ouster in January. They'll also provide a rare test case for a brand of populist, anti-corporate campaigning that activists often call for but many Democrats shy away from. These Democrats are using a class-based message in six districts red enough to have elected Republican state senators on the same day Barack Obama was elected president.
Wisconsinites head to the polls tomorrow for recall elections in six state senate districts. These elections (and two next week) will determine whether Governor Scott Walker will retain a Republican state senate majority, and will also gauge the likelihood that he'll face his own ouster in January. They'll also provide a rare test case for a brand of populist, anti-corporate campaigning that activists often call for but many Democrats shy away from. These Democrats are using a class-based message in six districts red enough to have elected Republican state senators on the same day Barack Obama was elected president.
You have to hand it to Fox News faux-populist Glenn Beck. If it weren't for him, Frances Fox Piven, professor of political science and sociology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, might not be doing today's National Teach-in on Austerity, Debt, Corporate Greed (and what YOU can do about it) alongside Princeton University Center for African American studies professor Cornel West live from New York City's Judson Church. Nor would they have 200-plus campuses participating in the livestream and teach-ins.
The Rev. Jesse Jackson at a pro-union rally in Wisconsin yesterday (Flickr/Karen Hickey)
About a year and a half ago, as the Tea Party began to dominate headlines and cable-news chyrons, liberals were befuddled. This "movement" had seemingly come from nowhere. Slowly, a general-consensus explanation emerged: A few tiny conservative gatherings were trumpeted (and trumped up) by right-wing media until they had the appearance of scale. We still, however, had a hard time wrapping our heads around how big and widespread these gatherings really were. When Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin called the Tea Partiers to the National Mall this summer -- but stopped just short of calling it a Tea Party -- liberals couldn't look away.
Opposites attract. That's not just true of love, it turns out, but also good ideas.
John Cary was trained as an architect. In school, he and his friends obsessed over their latest projects in the studio, late into the night. They talked about materials and concepts but never worried much about the people that would potentially live or work in the structures they were laboring over.
Turns out, architects generally try to avoid speaking to their clients but frequently speak for their clients. This is reinforced in the way that architecture is described in the press, in the way that award programs and design competitions are juried. Clients are all but invisible. Their stories are nowhere to be found. Before John met me, he thought storytelling was for kids.
After the policemen had sodomized the bus driver with a broomstick, and after one of the officers had sent a cell-phone video of the attack to other bus drivers in downtown Cairo to make clear that the cops could do as they pleased, and after someone had given the video to Wael Abbas, who posted it on his blog, something unusual happened -- at
A few weeks before he died in January 2010, Howard Zinn had lunch at the Warwick Hotel in Manhattan with New York Times columnist Bob Herbert. Their topic of conversation was, of course, social justice.
"If there is going to be change, real change," Zinn told Herbert, "it will have to work its way from the bottom up, from the people themselves. That's how change happens."
"The tide is turning, and people are turning against this bill to take away worker rights in Wisconsin," says a determined state Sen. Mark Miller, a Democrat from Wisconsin, his voice hoarse from a non-stop schedule of interviews with media from around the nation. "If the governor remains intransigent, there will be consequences," he vowed.
There is something truly wonderful about the fact than an obscure, 83-year-old American disciple of Gandhi helped inspire and facilitate the Egyptian revolution. When one sentence, buried well down in a New York Times story on Monday quoted a protester recounting that Egyptian activists had studied the work of an American, Gene Sharp, editors everywhere drew blanks and turned to Google. Even most progressives didn't recognize the name.
Sharp turns out to be an Oxford Ph.D, who has spent his life working on the theory and practical strategy of nonviolent resistance. You might think of him as a cross between Gandhi, pacifist A.J. Muste, and the legendary organizer Saul Alinsky.
People demonstrate in Cairo, Egypt, Monday, Jan. 31, 2011. (AP Photo/Ben Curtis)
The protests currently gripping Egypt caught everyone, including President Barack Obama, off guard. While it's been good to see the Obama administration coming out more strongly behind the protesters' democratic demands, warning longtime U.S. ally Hosni Mubarak away from a violent crackdown, and having no less than Secretary of State Hillary Clinton calling for an orderly “transition to democracy” (a welcome sign the administration is thinking seriously about a post-Mubarak Egypt) -- it is imperative the administration provide a more robust and strategic response to these events, given what a new Egypt could portend for the entire region.
First lady Hillary Rodham Clinton addresses a panel on women's health and security at the U.N. Women's Conference in Beijing, Tuesday, Sept. 5, 1995. (AP Photo/Greg Baker)
In 1995, then-first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton stood before the U.N. Women's Conference and declared, "Women's rights are human rights." It was a profoundly radical assertion. A little over 15 years later, it's accepted wisdom.
(And, not to be overlooked, that first lady in a cotton-candy-pink suit and a long blond flip is now the secretary of state who tells reporters to keep their questions to themselves when they ask her who her favorite designer is.)
Students and police at protests over tuition hikes in London last month (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis)
As 50,000 students in the United Kingdom took to the streets last week in protest of pending budget cuts for school tuition, it was hard not to wonder: Where is the student movement here in the U.S.?
There is one, to be sure. It's fueled, in large part, by the frustration of first-generation college students who are eager to make good on their parents' and grandparents' efforts to get the next generation to the promised land of higher education. And what a promised land it is -- high school graduates are three times more likely to live in poverty than college graduates, and eight times more likely to depend on public-assistance programs.
