We need new means of organizing ourselves. The Blog Workers Industrial Union & Benevolent Society, an old time sounding name picked out by the only minor to make the Nixon White House enemies list, is a quite suitable label, but people get confused about what it truly means.
A union was a fine means of organizing at the beginning of the 20th century. Those who worked and lived near each other banded together to improve their lot in life. This, more than any other advance, was the root cause for the United States' sprawling middle class and our dominance through the 20th century.
Today we face a far different environment ...
The phone, the fax, internet access, and transnational corporations coupled with a perverse, corrupt federal government that provides incentives for the export of high paying manufacturing jobs mean that the environment in which unions and our attendant powerful nation initially arose is gone. Gone, and it may not return even with the passage of the Employee Free Choice Act. Gone and peak oil ensures that it will never return. Gone and climate change is likely to push many of us back into local food production. Gone and even if we had the energy and environment in which to rebuild, our utterly corrupt economy would make that a multi-generation slog that couldn't even begin until we got honest about what is in those bank vaults.
We need a new way forward, leveraging the tools we already have laying about. The Blog Workers Industrial Union progresses, not because it follows the path laid down by Joe Hill, but due to an eyes wide open recognition of our energy depletion, environmental disaster, and economic collapse. We're stripped of the means of recovery and, like those in the lifeboats rowing away from the Titanic, our material situation is badly degraded, but we have to be thankful for what we have given the alternatives.
The classic union model is formation and collective bargaining with an employer. Post depression this occurred over a strong safety net and was supported by institutions on all sides that favored the American middle class. This has been systemically torn down, starting with the breaking of the air traffic controller's union by Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s. Today, with our banking sector wobbling towards an outright collapse it seems likely that we'll have no employment or safety net to speak of unless we make it happen for ourselves.
We can't even start rebuilding until we eliminate the causes and conditions behind our downfall. You can point to Wall Street regulation, or the GOP's fall from political party to doomsday cult, or a thousand other failures of character and governance large and small, but the cure for all of these is as old as human society.
We must first and foremost restore the rule of the law.
Thursday night I say in the Y on 92nd street in Manhattan. We'd come from a dinner party at Naomi Wolf's condo, a whole crew of us, and she got up on the stage with Vince Bugliosi and they talked about Charlotte Dennett's new book, The People v. Bush: One Lawyer's Campaign to Bring the President to Justice and the Nationwide Grassroots Movement She's Encountered Along the Way.
Over and over, we heard the phrase "the accountability movement". Let's make that proper, the Accountability Movement, a citizen driver reform effort, DEMANDS the rule of the law be applied to EVERYONE and there is no better place to start than with scofflaw #1, George W. Bush.
What does a reform initiative like the Accountability Movement have to do with organizing? Plenty.
See the corporations, that now have the ability to spend freely in our elections thanks to a Bush contaminated Supreme Court? See the mobs of Brown supporters flooding into Massachusetts to slap a complacent Democratic machine into painful awareness that there are no givens, not even in bright blue Massachusetts? We MUST get ourselves into some sort of order and get moving.
And DailyKos, which is good for some things, is very pointedly NOT the vehicle for that. Sure, it's good to get together, you can find good ideas here, and good people to work on them, but the utter lack of organizing tools will be the death of the people's will in the face of toxic corporations and even more toxic religious fanaticism.
We started the Blog Workers Industrial Union during Netroots Nation 2009 and its first moves were intentionally comedic, but I'd always had some other things in mind. Fast forward five months and we've got a social media consulting operation, we got behind a Kossack who wanted to start Peanut Butter PAC, and in the next few months the tools that our organizers are already using will be encapsulated in a collection of corporate entities we're setting up to foster innovation in organization. Innovation on many fronts; it's a tidy little trap for any corporation, political operative, or lone gun kook like Orly Taitz who thinks they'll trouble our people. We'll burn up their money, waste their time, provide civil and criminal liability for intruders working on their behalf, and I'm happy to collect information on violent right wing extremists for the authorities. We'll get those, too, because we're going to be effective.
Things are moving so very quickly and I think I do not spend enough time communicating what has and what will be happening as we take these next steps. One thing I can share is this – Ministry of Truth was sitting next to me during the panel and he walked away carrying the IBM Thinkpad X40 I lugged through my travels in 2008. And as I'm putting the finishing touches on this diary he is on his way to the post office to pick up a Blackberry I dispatched to him a few days ago. The church going folk of Massachusetts opened their homes to people from out of state who came to get Scott Brown elected. If those of us who are still employed can't reach out and support fellow activists we will deserve the losses we are dealt.