DON’T GET MAD! GET EVEN: DEFEAT WINGNUTS EVERYWHERE (Pt. 1)

From zizi2, reprinted with permission:


DON’T GET MAD! GET EVEN: DEFEAT WINGNUTS EVERYWHERE (Pt. 1)

*ACTION DIARY*

Listen folks! If Halperin’s juvenile antics this past week confirmed anything at all, it is the fact that we should expect even more of this venal behavior from these mediocre silver-spooned DC gate-keepers who will continue to spew right wing ideological gunk cooked up in the dens of America’s corporate powerbrokers, from their gilded beltway media perches. The incorporation of celebrity “journalists” (that label is pointless!!) and their entire media retinue into the plutocratic corps has been the single most damaging blow to our democracy. They render the “public” in Public Square moot. All we have is simulacra.

Beware, Halperin’s job is to distract us, to shift our focus from the Repug economic and Social Safety net destruction agenda. They will do a whole lot more distracting until the election. WE. CANNOT. LOSE. FOCUS!!! We are in an existential war. Our adversaries are a dimwitted but dangerous cabal of right wing media lackeys, corporate boardroom retrogrades, and their puppets in political office. They don’t want the Republic itself to survive with us the 98% who are not super-wealthy thriving in it. When you are dealing with a faction that has told us who make up America, loud and clear that they will detonate Weapons of Mass Destruction unless we surrender everything including our lives to them, you better believe them. They are not bluffing. They mean it. This is no hyperbole.


And when you have a corporate media that tells us to “cave” to our destruction (as Jessica Yellin did on CNN), this is no longer an eye-roll moment. It is an asymmetrical war. We have to work harder, smarter, stealthier, and twice as long to BUILD the tiniest of advances, while they can flunk and grift their way to political power just do DESTROY. Yeah the fact that a sizeable portion of this country gives a platform to the Palins, Bachmans, McCains, Rick Scotts, Scott Walkers, Snyders et. al. should tell us all we need to know about how steep our climb ALWAYS is.



There’s something to be said about an adversary that is worthy of one’s intellectual energy, and one that is not. These people are not worth an ideological brawl over the direction of this country. They have ZERO desire for any direction except burning the house down. They have already accelerated killing us economically, strategically, and technologically, while constitutionally decimating our rights and our safety nets. Pete Sessions (R-TX) told us publicly in February 2009 that the only way the GOP gets back to power is to copy the Taliban and Al Qaeda playbook. They have acted accordingly. They are terrorists. We have to DEFEAT them everywhere. CRUSH them. Period.

It used to be that we ALL agreed that we have an AMERICA that is supreme among nations (exceptionalism anyone!); an America that we would fight for, steal for, kill and maim other people for; an America that other nations loathed for precisely those reasons. That message was drummed into my ears when I naturalized as a citizen. We used to believe that our fierce internal partisan fights were about HOW to preserve that one AMERICA that we all share. No more. They give a whole new meaning to “Hoover” economics . They hoover upwards to the 2% every dime and resource in sight NOW, gorge it down, produce nothing, then implode!!!. To literally, systemically, and metaphorically kill off 98% of the citizens of a country, or herd them into mass serfdom, and still think you will have a country left to sustain the wealth of the top 2% is not just lunacy, it defies the very core logic of capitalism, even the ruthless kind. It is no Capitalism. It is a death wish. Adam Smith must be spinning in his grave.

The wingnut cabal bankrolling politicians and corporate media carnival barkers don’t even know how to be capitalists anymore. Otherwise, how is that the same people who scream “free markets”, “competition,” “efficiency” would be so averse to actually practicing capitalism? Why are they not interested in beating China and other emerging competitors in the race for the industries, products and services that are going be the huge money makers in this century? Seriously, real capitalism and rational calculus has been traded in for faith-based corporate welfarism.

Just like that pathetic image of Osama bin Laden replaying his greatest hits of bygone decades in an endless loop, our industrial and corporate classes are totally bereft of creative juice, choosing to foolishly cling to outmoded technologies and business models, while every emerging economy is racing for new frontiers. They back religio-fanatics at home to throw out science education when it was this education that led in the past to the breakthroughs that created their wealth in the first place. Like two-bit hussies they are all google-eyed salivating at China’s 1.2 billion consumer base that they cannot even get a toe-hold in. Big problem: what are they gonna be selling to this pool of consumers already getting used to high tech products that we in the US cannot even imagine?

But back home they kill us the golden geese that lay their gilded eggs. They’d rather use their current political leverage plus Citizens United to re-create a malleable labor force, reducing it to the lowest common serf-like denominator prevalent around the world. The only problem with this fantasy is that the people of the emerging economies are not standing still. They are IMPROVING their conditions while we are decelerating ours. And worse of all, why would you destroy your reliable consumer base by diminishing their purchasing power?

Similarly, our controllers of financial capital have completely abdicated every single chance to make a profitable killing on innovative ripe technologies that America has a comparative advantage in launching. Instead they clamor for instant bubbles, and now have their lazy eyes set on the fat Social security money pot to play Wall Street Roulette with. I am no business expert or economist, but I fail to see what their treasonous endgame is. But the frightening part of this all is that our plutocrats ARE as arrogant and refuse to accept that their calculus is disastrous to their OWN interests. Why? They are counting on taxpayer bailout to recover any losses from their financial terrorist acts. Such atrophying of already addled brains!!!

And so we fight them at ALL levels of power with a superior counter-terrorism strategy: Organize, mobilize/motivate, define end goal, set timeline, multiple back-up plans, laser focus, no distractions, stealth attack, crush them. By necessity ours MUST be a multi-front, multipronged operation. Rinse. Repeat. Rinse. Repeat. Rinse. Repeat.

So let’s review our assets:

ORGANIZE:

We have the people power and we can prompt a genuine grassroots critical mass on any issue. They have an astroturf club with Koch-greased triggers. We outnumber them. 69 plus million of us performed a historic feat at the polls from presidency to local races. We slacked in 2010. We can drown them out in 2012. We did so with media pushback on multiple platforms, donor numbers and donations at OFA this week. Good. Let’s do it some more and with greater passion. Organize for every single political race in your neck of the woods. Don’t cede the local races, including school board, councilperson at the local level to these maniacs. We are seeing how toxic they have been to our welfare at the local level since November 2010. If you can, run yourself for office. Tell us and we will support you.
MOBILIZE/MOTIVATE:

Hope, smart thinking, passion, and fearlessness propelled us to victory in 2008. Hope, smart thinking, passion and fearlessness will drive us to victory in 2012 and beyond. Let’s not rely on bandwagon waves to get us to our end goal. Bandwagon waves are good, but as pure icing. Let us not be personality and flash-blitz driven for motivation. Our President is great at reminding us why we are in this fight of our lives. It is his job to rally us every so often. But our cold calculation for victory CANNOT depend on him alone. He told us so. We have the tools and the political savvy to sow seeds wherever we are, in whatever capacity we can muster.

a.
Registration:

Now, we do the grunt work, we dig the trenches – Research and compile myriad voting rules for our districts and states. Print bullet point guides to give to people you talk to. Lobby against the wave of voter intimidation laws where you can. Register voters. Register voters. Register voters. Check the news laws restricting registration first.

b.
Media warriors:

Let’s be frank. We have a deficit in traditional corporate media noisemakers amplifying our narratives. Only President Obama is able to break through the right wing chokehold sometimes. But we have nimble fingers and loud voices to pushback. Color of Change got Beck off the air, We got Halperin “indefinitely” off MSNBC. We write LTEs, Emails, Tweet, Facebook the fourth Estate, THEN follow up talking to our circle of acquaintances. Utilize whatever tools you are comfortable with but direct your efforts to people other than us already in the choir, or else we create a fatal echo chamber.

c.
The message:

We are all (including moi) guilty of focusing too much energy and bandwidth talking about loony Repugs. Our opponents are COUNTING on that. They believe the drawn-out 2008 Democratic primary battle entrenched Democratic Party narratives in the public zeitgeist and drowned out McCain’s campaign. They want to replicate that this time. We absolutely MUST attack and counterattack them. No swiftboating us. AND we need to continuously talk up what our side has ACHIEVED in unapologetic terms. Repeat over and over. There are lots of lists circulating about PBO’s legislative feats. Great, pass them on. To avoid the dreaded eyeroll from skeptics, we need to personalize our narratives when talking to people about these historic achievements. Do the same in the LTEs. We have an uphill battle to fight in the public persuasion arena, but unless we do it relentlessly we will continue to cede valuable public opinion real estate to the wingnuts.

d.
Run for Office Yourself:

Look at the loony nihilist marauders we have on our school boards, city halls, and state legislatures deciding the fate of our kids, state workers, and Medicaid budgets. See them sell off state assets to their cronies in a kleptocratic raid-in. Look, these wingnut suicide bombers are NOT interested in the future of this country, and certainly not yours. If you ran you could do no worse. Trust me. From where I currently am outside the US, I weep when I compare the news I hear everyday about frenzied technological innovations emerging from places around the world while the US wallows in wingnut religio-fanatical muck.

I have absolutely no doubt that my analysis earlier this year about the Koch brothers and their ilk “dismantling of our Commonweal” has only been put on a sped up timeline. They are desperate to beat the demographic clock. Our job is to stop them in their tracks. We have to train our sights on local races with a laser focus. President Obama can capably take care of the Repug clowns running for president. They should not be our main targets. In fact the oligarchic puppeteers are counting on Democrats’ historical focus on top ticket political races, while they control the unsexy but politically potent local races. Just look at how many races feature unchallenged Repug candidates in your own district. These are the people who become cogs in the local government wheel gumming it up. We need to contest every single race everywhere.

This is a prelude to a series of Action diaries that I will be posting from now until the election in 2012, complete with action strategies for both on and offline activism, sample rapid response content and guidelines, media and legislature contacts, tweet warrior action targets, coordination with other allies in the fight to save our country, etc. These diaries will act as clearing houses for information and alerts that you can all bring to everyone’s attention especially in your district and state. We ALL have skills we can lend to this effort, no matter how tech savvy you are or not.

To get the ball rolling, What is Working has created a tremendously useful online resource to get us mobilizing talking to folks with snazzy facts. Talking points that you will need have been digested into bite size portions. No need to reinvent the wheel. Use the distilled information information and brief You tube videos to help you along. There is even an action page for Twitter messaging. Make this site your best friend!

We ran a seamless machine with both boots on the ground solid community organizing and cyber organizing in 2008. We can do that again and plan to sustain it. We need to realize that without people at all political levels who fight for our interests, President Obama alone at the helm will be obstructed at every turn as we have already seen.

Folks we MUST win this fight. There is more at stake than a presidency.

HAPPY JULY 4TH!!!!! Let’s save that independence!!!