The idea behind community organizing is to harness the people in the community to turn adversaries into partners.
For example, if you have a landlord who ill-maintains a building, you apply influence (can you say protests and rent strikes?) to convince them that properly maintaining the building would be in the best interest of everyone involved.
If you have a need for jobs, or fresh and reasonably priced groceries, in the neighborhood, you rally the community and outside of the community to convince the employer, or grocery store, to move in by showing them that they will benefit by joining the community.
There are elements in the neighborhood who are simply not amenable to partnering, violent drug dealers come to mind.
In that case, you must form a partnership between the residents of the neighborhood and law enforcement (THE MAN), so that you can focus efforts effectively to remove the bad actors.
Community organizing is therefore a method to leverage a group of people with little power into an entity which in aggregate has the power to make things better.
There is a problem in the White House right now. They are applying this model in a situation that does not work.
(full blown rant, with F-word, after fold)
First and foremost, we are talking about Barack Obama, President of the United States of America, which is pretty much the definition of THE MAN.
He is the most powerful individual on the face of the earth.
Secondly, it appears to me that the Obama administration if fixated on finding "partners", and refuses to recognize those elements not amenable to partnering.
I could understand, though I disagree profoundly, how the administration might view health insurance companies as potential partners, but then they further eschewed any potential clubs (single payer, public option, which are analagous to protests and rent strikes) that might be used to coerce them to behave as better members of the community.
That being said, there is no such excuse for Goldman Sachs and the rest of the little Vampire Squids out there. They are destructive criminals, and nothing more, even if they do give people like Larry Summers highly remunerative consulting gigs following their stints of public service.
That being said, it's BP that has convinced me that the administration has lost its fucking mind in its pursuit of the "partnering" ideal, or maybe it's driven me out of my fucking mind.
I shall leave that exercise to the reader.
BP didn't just have an accident, the Deepwater Horizon project was so fucked up that one of their contractors fled the doomed platform in the hours before the explosion:
AlanfromBigEasy on May 14, 2010 – 3:06pm Permalink | Subthread | Comments top
Story circulating in New Orleans
With appropriate caveats:
BP contracted Schlumberger (SLB) to run the Cement Bond Log (CBL) test that was the final test on the plug that was skipped. The people testifying have been very coy about mentioning this, and you’ll see why.
SLB is an extremely highly regarded (and incredibly expensive) service company. They place a high standard on safety and train their workers to shut down unsafe operations.
SLB gets out to the Deepwater Horizon to run the CBL, and they find the well still
kicking heavily, which it should not be that late in the operation. SLB orders the
"company man" (BP’s man on the scene that runs the operation) to dump kill fluid down the well and shut-in the well. The company man refuses. SLB in the very next sentence asks for a helo to take all SLB personel back to shore. The company man says there are no more helo’s scheduled for the rest of the week (translation: you’re here to do a job, now do it). SLB gets on the horn to shore, calls SLB’s corporate HQ, and gets a helo flown out there at SLB’s expense and takes all SLB personel to shore.
6 hours later, the platform explodes.
Pick your jaw up off the floor now. No CBL was run after the pressure tests because the contractor high-tailed it out of there. If this story is true, the company man (who survived) should go to jail for 11 counts of negligent homicide.
OK, these folks are murderers.
Barack Obama, and Ken Salazar (but Salazar is a useless Corporate Dem anyway) should not be in partnership with BP, they should be breaking fucking heads, because, when you are THE MAN, sometimes you have to do this, or you are just a punk.
Seeing as how the Obama administration is claiming the right to detain citizens and other persons without benefit of trial under the "Unitary executive" theory, and the Supreme Court is saying that corporations are people, how about taking over BP's operations in the United States until an INDEPENDENT investigation of the company's operations can be completed.
Between the spill, the refinery explosion, and the Prudoe Bay Spill, it's that they are a clear and present danger to the people of the United States that you have sworn to protect.
To understand just how fucking stupid this is from both a policy and politics perspective, you need to know the following" In criticizing the Obama administration on its actions, and lack thereof, in the oil spill, RNC Chairman Michael Steele sounds both sane and intelligent:
STEELE: Well, you know, well, look, I mean, it's not -- people shouldn't worry about the Republican response to the BP oil spill. They should worry about the Democrat president's response to the BP oil spill. It is one thing to actually get on the ground and get in front of this thing. It's another thing to sit back and hold BP accountable without helping them, and that's what's happening here. I mean, the federal government should have stepped into this thing immediately, to help make sure that the appropriate steps are being taken by BP, all federal agencies in support of the state government to try to get this thing cleaned up. And here we are, almost a month and a half later, and it's still spilling oil.
.....
STEELE: That's a direct quote, and it's a philosophical position held by a lot of libertarians, which Rand Paul is. They have a very, very strong view about the limitations of government intrusion into the private sector. That is a philosophical perspective. We have had a lot of members go to the United States Senate with a lot of different philosophies, but when they get to the body, how they work to move the country forward matters, and right now, the federal government is not moving forward on BP and cleaning up that mess; the federal government is not moving forward on the economy and creating jobs. There are a lot of -- there are a lot of philosophies, a lot of talk on this hill about folks to get stuff done. What the American people are looking for is what are the concrete steps that this administration has taken to clean up the mess in the Gulf before it gets worse, and to create the jobs that are necessary for people to go back to building the economy the way that everybody wants it to be.
Think about that for a second: Just how fucking wrong to you fucking have to be to make Michael fucking Steele sound fucking sane and fucking intelligent?
Whatever you are doing, it's fucking wrong.
It's bad fucking policy, and it's bad fucking politics.
Roll tape: