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2009-09-07 Home Front: Politix

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Posted by badanov 2009-09-07 00:52|| || Front Page|| [5 views ] Top

#1 it would appear that Preznit O associates with some scurrilous characters. I'm shocked, shocked!

Posted by Frank G">Frank G 2009-09-07 10:06|| 2009-09-07 10:06|| Front Page Top

#2 More on Comradess Barbara Lee.

Posted by Besoeker 2009-09-07 10:15|| 2009-09-07 10:15|| Front Page Top

#3 At this juncture, I'd be shocked if the Prez had any cohorts who *weren't* scurrilous.

When Jones bailed, I googled to see how many hours he had been on the job. Turns out he has been flying under the radar as part of the Big O's administration since March. Thank you, Main Stream Media, for your in-depth reporting! Lord knows who else is lurking out there.

Posted by SteveS 2009-09-07 20:26|| 2009-09-07 20:26|| Front Page Top

#4 Jones had planned to move to Washington, DC, and had already landed a job and an apartment there. But in jail, he said, "I met all these young radical people of color -- I mean really radical, communists and anarchists. And it was, like, 'This is what I need to be a part of.'" Although he already had a plane ticket, he decided to stay in San Francisco. "I spent the next ten years of my life working with a lot of those people I met in jail, trying to be a revolutionary." In the months that followed, he let go of any lingering thoughts that he might fit in with the status quo. "I was a rowdy nationalist on April 28th, and then the [Rodney King] verdicts came down on April 29th," he said. "By August, I was a communist."

...

"I saw our little movement destroyed over a lot of shit-talking and bullshit," he said. "It just seemed like an ongoing train crash that was calling itself a political movement. It was much more destructive internally than anyone was talking about, and much less impactful externally than anyone was willing to admit."

Jones' fixation on solidarity dates from this experience. He took an objective look at the movement's effectiveness and decided that the changes he was seeking were actually getting farther away. Not only did the left need to be more unified, he decided, it might also benefit from a fundamental shift in tactics. "I realized that there are a lot of people who are capitalists -- shudder, shudder -- who are really committed to fairly significant change in the economy, and were having bigger impacts than me and a lot of my friends with our protest signs," he said.

First, he discarded the hostility and antagonism with which he had previously greeted the world, which he said was part of the ego-driven romance of being seen as a revolutionary. "Before, we would fight anybody, any time," he said. "No concession was good enough; we never said 'Thank you.' Now, I put the issues and constituencies first. I'll work with anybody, I'll fight anybody if it will push our issues forward. ... I'm willing to forgo the cheap satisfaction of the radical pose for the deep satisfaction of radical ends."

His new philosophy emphasizes effectiveness, which he believes is inextricably tied to unity. He still considers himself a revolutionary, just a more effective one, who has realized that the progressive left's insistence on remaining a counterculture destroys its potential as a political movement. "One of my big heroes is Malcolm X, not because I agree with Malcolm, but because he wasn't afraid to change in public," he said.

Devising a new strategy for the left went hand-in-hand with finding a new approach in his personal life and relationships. Jones said he arrived at that by harking back to his roots. Although he had spent many childhood summers in "sweaty black churches," and in college had discovered the black liberation theology that reinterprets the Christ story as an anticolonial struggle, he had pulled away from spirituality during his communist days. During his 2000 crisis, he looked for answers in Buddhism, the philosophy known as deep ecology, and at open-minded institutions such as the East Bay Church of Religious Science.

The last step was learning to ignore critics from within the movement who didn't appreciate his new philosophy and allies. "I'm confused half the time about what I'm doing, but none of the things that leftists use to discipline each other into marginality have any power over me anymore," he said. "It's like, 'Oh, you're working with white people.' Or 'Who are you accountable to?' A lot of the things that we say to each other to keep anybody from getting too uppity, too effective, I just don't listen to anymore. I care about the progressive movements as they are, but I mainly care about all of our movements becoming a lot bigger and a lot stronger."

The New Face of Environmentalism

Posted by KBK 2009-09-07 22:15|| 2009-09-07 22:15|| Front Page Top

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