Robbie Lieberman at
In These Times writes
The People’s Climate March Is Still Changing the Debate on Climate Change. Some excerpts:
The debate on climate change has changed radically in the past several months, especially since the September 22 People’s Climate March that took place in New York City on the eve of the United Nations Climate Summit.
Voices of anti-fracking activists are taken seriously, the United Nations has inched forward on addressing climate change, as has President Obama. The march alone did not move the conversation along, but its impact was not negligible. While it received surprisingly little attention from corporate media, huge numbers of activists found it profoundly inspiring.
At the very least, the march brought a ray of hope in the face of so much pain and struggle—endless war, police brutality, violence against women and queers, economic inequality, and yes, climate disasters. But that hope, and the overall success of the event, seemed to come as a surprise to many participants, including me. What was noteworthy about the march and what might it tell us about contemporary social movements?
I was a participant and observer in the march, but am also a professor who has taught and written about the culture of U.S. social movements for a number of years. My interest is not only in what brings people together, but in what sustains movements for social change. […]
A number of elements distinguished this march from rallies and events that had come before. To begin with, the turnout was far beyond what the organizers (or anyone else) expected; by most accounts there were between 300,000 and 400,000 people. This made the march the largest climate change march ever (at least in the U.S.). It was about twice the size of the 1963 March on Washington and larger than most of the big antiwar protests of any era (with the exception of the 1982 protest against nuclear weapons at the United Nations meeting on disarmament).
The diversity of the crowd was another distinguishing feature. Many people continue to think of environmentalists as hippies or tree-huggers, but the variety of people at this march belied those old stereotypes and illustrated how widespread the concern about climate change is. People from many regions, professions, and movements, and a variety of races, classes, gender identities and degrees of ability joined the action.
The march was also noteworthy for its creativity. The ubiquitous photo of the front of the march shows the celebrity participants, but it does not begin to capture what went on behind them. […]
Outside the formal political arena, the march highlighted the significance of people coming out of isolation to establish alternative forms of education and develop a collective sense of empowerment in order to challenge entrenched social norms and political institutions.
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2007—Lieberman Says He Will Filibuster With Republicans:
Once again the "independent Democrat" from Connecticut is burnishing his Republican credentials, this time by announcing that he will join in a filibuster against the Senate resolution opposing the escalation of troops in Iraq.
MS. BLOCK: Can you imagine a scenario where you would join in with a Republican filibuster to stop the resolution, if it comes to that?
SEN. LIEBERMAN: I can because I think that it – this is this important.
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Calling the resolution, "phony," Lieberman says:
I say to those who are opposed to what the president is now suggesting that they have a responsibility to do one thing: one is to come up with a better plan if they don’t like this one... |
First, for the origin of this argument, go here. And Lieberman, like Bush and his acolytes, continue to ignore that there have been other plans put forward, such as the ones offered by John Murtha, Joe Biden and Jack Reed. But of course their fatal flaw is that they don't agree with the Bush plan to "stay the course, plus 21,500."
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On
today's "encore performance" Kagro in the Morning show, it was yet another snowy day, and with a special election going on to determine control of the VA senate, at that. Fox's Andrea Tantaros scolds Americans for not knowing their history, then Palins her way through a mangled Boston Tea Party story.
Armando recapped the Christie news, and we segue (via would-be NJ pol Carl Lewis) to the weekend's big sports outrage story, Seattle cornerback Richard Sherman. We read Ta-Nehisi Coates (twice) on the subject, and wondered what, if anything, made his boastfulness different from that of outspoken billionaires and their "prosperity gospel."
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