Tag: organizers
12 Post-Election Ideas From Frontline Organizers

12 Post-Election Ideas From Frontline Organizers

Reprinted with permission from AlterNet.

When you find yourself in a suddenly darkened room, what do you do? Some rush blindly to where they think the door might be. Others stand still, let their eyes adjust to the different environment, reorient themselves, then cautiously move forward. Some search out people who might be able to show the way. Post-election, many people are reassessing and searching for the best way forward. Here are some ideas on where we should be going and what we should be doing from experienced, thoughtful people who are organizing on the front lines.

1. You Were Born for This Time

My friend Cherri Foytlin, a mother who lives in rural Louisiana in a deeply Republican area, spends her time organizing to protect our earth, water and the rights of indigenous people. For that she has been arrested and is subject to death threats. Right after the election she wrote: “Fear no evil. Joy and Love still live, and it is up to us to build the shelter for the Hope that they provide. Lower those pointed fingers, we will need them to grasp the hammer and forge the nails. Do not give in to your righteous anxieties. Our heroes have never left us. All the good that ever was, it is still here. You were born for this time.”

2. Join Allies

Marisa Franco, one of the founders of Mijente, calls on Latinos and African Americans to join together with whites who didn’t go for Trump. “No one is going to build it, no one is going to give it to us. Positioning folks like the people in Arizona who built resilience and strength, positioning people who have been survivors to teach others. People in the South, in Arizona have been doing that for years,” she said. “We’ve got to build bridges across communities.”

3. Fight and Dig In for the Long Haul

Jaribu Hill of the Mississippi Workers Center for Human Rights, said, “At a time when black women and men are murdered under the color of law, as the great Medgar Evers said, we cannot let up now! At a time when trans people are murdered by homophobic hatemongers, we cannot let up now! At a time when thousands of immigrants are targeted for exploitation and deportation, we cannot let up now!”

Patricia Cullors, one of the founders of Black Lives Matter, insisted, “You don’t negotiate with hate. I don’t think now is the time for diplomacy. Now is the time to stand up around what is right and what’s wrong.”

Dave Archambault, Tribal Chair of Standing Rock, challenges us to dig in for the long haul. In honor of our future generations, we fight this pipeline to protect our water, our sacred places, and all living beings. “We’re about protecting our future. And that’s what he should be about. He should think, how can I protect my future so that 50 years from now, 100 years from now, there’s something there? And that if we continue to do what we’re doing at the pace that we’re doing it, in 50 years we’re going to see mass destruction because Mother Earth cannot sustain herself with all the activity that’s taking place.”

4. Humility, Grief and Hope

Equality Louisiana’s message the day after the election began with, “We’re not sure what to say either.” Humility is a starting point for knowledge. Like Socrates said, “The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.”

Likewise, it is okay to grieve. That said, neither humility nor grief is an excuse for paralysis or inaction. May Boeve of 350.org: “It’s hard to know what to say in a moment like this. Many of us are reeling from the news and shaken to the core about what a Trump presidency will mean for the country, and the difficult work ahead for our movements. Trump’s misogyny, racism, and climate denial pose a greater threat than we’ve ever faced, and the battleground on which we’ll fight for justice of all kinds will be that much rougher. The hardest thing to do right now is to hold on to hope, but it’s what we must do. We should feel our anger, mourn, pray, and then do everything we can to fight hate together.”

5. Courage

Pablo Alvarado of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network stated, “Fear has been the driving force of this presidential election. A fear which has spurred hatred, promoted violence and created an environment where families worry about their future, about their loved ones. Fear won last night, but this type of fear can only be defeated by courage and action.” Likewise, Justin Hansford wrote, “Woke up this morning, mind stayed on freedom. Stop acting like we never took a loss before, then won. My ancestors stared slavery in the face.”

6. Listen To and Talk Face to Face with People 

Social media is not a substitute for human to human communication. As Dream Defenders suggests: “We know it can be tempting to use social media as a way to engage in this moment, to understand where our people are at and to tell people what we think they are doing wrong. But right now, we need to stay centered, to foster actual human connection and build a shared commitment to struggle together.” Listening is part of our orientation. We listen to pick up clues from our fellow seekers about what is the best path, the best next step.

7. Solidarity

“Solidarity is our protection,” Reverend Deborah Lee of the Interfaith Movement for Human Integrity in California told David Bacon. “Our best defense is an organized community committed to each other and bound together with all those at risk.… We ask faith communities to consider declaring themselves ‘sanctuary congregations’ or ‘immigrant welcoming congregations.’”

DRUM (Desis Rising Up & Moving), an organization of South Asian and Indo-Caribbean immigrants, most of whom are Muslims and undocumented, called for action. “In the words initially chanted by working-class youth of the British Asian Youth Movement against neo-Nazi fascism, we are ‘here to stay and here to fight’ in solidarity with our black, Latino, LGBTQ, women and worker communities.”

8. Resistance

The Center for Constitutional Rights election statement was stark. “The dangers of a Trump presidency go beyond the attacks on people of color, women, Muslims, immigrants, refugees, LGBTQI people, and people with disabilities. His campaign was marked by the strategies and tactics of authoritarian regimes: endorsing and encouraging violence against political protesters, threatening to jail his opponent, refusing to say he would accept the results of the election if he lost, punishing critical press. Together with all those who value freedom, justice, and self-determination, we must resist and prevent at all costs a slide into American fascism.” They conclude, “Resistance is our civic duty.”

9. Continue Building Local and State Power.  

Sergio Sosa, director of Nebraska’s Heartland Workers Center, reflected on a 20-year history of community and workplace organizing. “People here have to remember the power they’ve built on a local level and use it,” Sosa says, “even in the face of a national defeat.”

10. Look Outward Globally

Kathy Kelly of Voices for Creative Nonviolence, an activist in the U.S., Iraq and Afghanistan, insisted on renewing our global connections. “Many U.S. people awoke this week with a new understanding of the dangers facing our common life together. These battles we fight are not a game, and they can escalate into even direr realities. I look to Afghanistan, I look to the simple facts faced by the Standing Rock protesters, and I know we must look back to the sorrows which so much of the world will commemorate today. These sorrows, so painfully real, can help all of us yearn above all for an understanding by people worldwide, and here in my own frightened, divided country—an understanding that we live in a real world, beset with multiple wars, and must at last turn to each other, prepared to live more simply, share resources more radically, and abolish all wars in order to build a real peace.”

11. Working People

Adolph Reed says organizing has to address the concerns of working people. “Defeating these reactionary tendencies will require crafting a politics based on recognition that the identity shared most broadly in the society is having to or being expected to work for a living and that that is the basis for the solidarity necessary to prevail and, eventually, to make a more just and equitable society.”

12. Organize. Organize. Organize!

No doubt we have to organize. But a note of caution: We are called to organize intelligently. Unless we organize in a thoughtful and humble way that understands the dynamics of race, class, gender, and place, as my friend Ron Chisom of the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond likes to say, “We will not be organizing, but disorganizing.” There is no shortcut. We cannot organize for peace and justice if we do not model peace and justice in our organizing.

Bill Quigley is a human rights lawyer and professor at Loyola University New Orleans College of Law. He is also a member of the legal collective of School of Americas Watch, and can be reached at quigley77@gmail.com.

IMAGE: Dakota Access Pipeline protesters square off against police near the Standing Rock Reservation and the pipeline route outside the little town of Saint Anthony, North Dakota, U.S., October 5, 2016. REUTERS/Terray Sylvester

‘Occupy Wall Street’ Organizers: We’re Loud, We’re Here, We’re Deliberately Unclear!

It’s lunchtime for the occupiers of Wall Street.

The activists who have been camping out in Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan since Sept. 17 to protest the power, wealth, and indifference of America’s major financial institutions need no help organizing their meals. Enormous submarine sandwiches and dozens of pizza boxes line the makeshift outdoor cafeteria they’ve built, and things move with impressive efficiency, the line never growing long and none left hungry.

Right now, they’re focused on sustaining the demonstrations, not building an agenda or articulating support for any particular policies.

“We don’t have official spokespeople. There’s no leaders of this group, no organization with an umbrella over this thing,” said Justin Wedes, an organizer with the New York City General Assembly and U.S. Uncut. “The groups that have been driving the organizing, New York City General Assembly, U.S. Day of Rage, U.S. Uncut. They’re grassroots people without the influence of major unions or NGOs. As more people join, we try to remind them that this is a collection of individuals. You leave your institutional baggage at the door.”

But it might be hard to leave that institutional baggage — and financial support — at the door, as thousands of union members and establishment progressives from New York’s Working Families Party are poised to join the protesters in a solidarity march on Wednesday and more traditional liberal groups hash out their strategies on how to respond to what enthusiastic boosters have dubbed an “American Spring.”

“The Wall Street demonstrations, whatever criticisms people may levy against the style, certainly speak to issues that our members feel,” said Maida Rosenstein, president of the United Auto Workers (UAW) Local 2110 in New York. She anticipated the national arm of her union, and also the SEIU 1199, the most powerful local in the Northeast, formally jumping on board this week.

Faced with increasing attention from the media — and scrutiny from the established left — the protest organizers have said they will roll out a set of demands in the coming days. But for the time being, they seem to prefer to keep things vague.

“One of the biggest attacks against what we’re building here is: ‘OK you’ve made your point, go home,'” Wedes said. “But we’re not done, we’re just getting started.”

The organizers come from outside the traditional political channels — the two most prominent early sources of support for the protest were the Canadian magazine Adbusters and the hacker community Anonymous. And the local activists that have organized the crucial first nights of camping hail mainly from community groups that formed to protest New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s budget cuts; many camped out in “Bloombergville” earlier this year.

By holding back from specific policies, the protesters are driving home the point that harnessing popular frustration with big banks and Wall Street into a sense of action is a bigger priority than details of what progressive change on Wall Street would look like.

Despite the ad hoc aesthetic at the camp itself, there’s a sense among progressive activists and policy wonks that there needs to be more of an agenda to turn the cultural spark into political momentum.

“Wall Street’s irresponsible actions wrecked our economy, and the anger felt across America is now making itself visible,” said Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. “Congress should pass a spree of Wall Street accountability legislation — including a resolution expressing congressional support if the Justice Department sees fit to throw Wall Street bankers in jail. Congress should also pass a Wall Street speculation fee — which would raise billions — instead of even thinking about cutting Medicare, Medicare, or Social Security benefits.”

The emergence of the protests — which have spread to cities across America — coincides with many state Attorneys General balking at a proposed settlement that would ask a lump sum of $20 billion or so from the nation’s biggest banks, in exchange for freeing them from future liability for the mortgage crisis and illegal foreclosures.

“It’s the last way to really affect things,” Mike Konczal, a research fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, said of the settlement. “It’s not a cosmetic thing. It goes to the core of what went wrong. And what continues to go wrong in damaging peoples’ lives.” (Konzcal also has laid out a three-point list of demands for the protesters to adopt.)

Activists promise to continue into the winter, and their energy, though it wanes at the start of each work week, seems to increase each weekend.

“This is a growing thing,” said Wedes, a recent college graduate who has emerged as one of the de facto leaders of the organizers, despite the unanimous distaste for hierarchy among the participants. “There’s a dialogue happening across the country about the effects and symptoms of Wall Street greed and corporate dominance over this political and social spectrum.”

Which basically means the next few weeks are crucial.

“Right now, this Wall Street venture is somewhere between a moment and a movement,” said Todd Gitlin, a professor at Columbia who was president of Students for a Democratic Society at the beginning of the 1960s protest explosion. “Frankly, I’m amazed it took this long for there to be any protest, however hazy or diffuse, directed at Wall Street, given what the country has been through the last few years.”