Hold Fast

Over at ThinkProgress, Brad Johnson has a good post about the deficit reduction debate that’s been tied to the debt ceiling. He puts the political positions of progressives, President Obama, and the Tea Party side by side to draw out a continuum of recommended actions (or non-action). Johnson writes, “As of this moment, the president’s [...]

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Cenk Uygur of MSNBC does his best Howard Beale impersonation, explaining to his audience why he turned down an offer from MSNBC that would have paid him more money to have a smaller role that prevented him from being as hard on the Obama administration and other Democrats as he currently is. As Cenk puts [...]

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Digby responds to a long, interesting piece on the differences between how Republicans and Democrats maintain their political coalitions across time and legislative battles by Robert Cruickshank. Digby writes: Cruikshank is making an appeal to progressives to apply the GOP coalition rules to themselves and stick together, even if the centrists continue to play their [...]

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This piece in the American Prospect by Vivien Labaton and Gara Lamarche, titled “Why Movements Matter,” is definitely worth reading. On the one hand, I strongly agree with the identification of pro-worker, pro-fair taxation, and pro-immigrant rights movements as pointing in the direction of a meaningful broader progressive movement (though if you were to look [...]

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My friend Ilyse Hogue, formerly of MoveOn, Rainforest Action Network, and Greenpeace and now of Media Matters for America, has a very important article in The Nation, titled “Why the Right Attacked Unions, ACORN and Planned Parenthood.” Hogue makes the convincing case that the American right has attacked institutions which not only fight for progressive [...]

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The New York Times has a profile on Gene Sharp, arguably one of the most important advocates for freedom of the last hundred years. Sharp’s writing on non-violent strategic campaigning, specifically on the overthrow of dictatorships, has been instrumental to the thinking of activists in places like Serbia and Egypt, and remains instructive for countless [...]

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UK Uncut is doing what is probably the most inspiring and savvy economic organizing in the English-speaking world. The video above is just brilliant, not only for how powerful it is but for how simple they make the act of standing up for economic just in the face of austerity measures. The accompanying blog post [...]

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Matt Stoller has a post up at Naked Capitalism where he looks at the revolution in Egypt’s strong labor base and the extent to which it is a rejection of a Rubinite economic view. Stoller writes: What is going in Egypt represents a remarkable new political coalition striking deep at the heart of the Washington [...]

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It’s hard to imagine a scenario where the future is won, but no model for organizing against income inequality, cuts to public services, and tax evasion by the wealthy is used. Juan Cole on Google exec Wael Ghonim’s organizing model in Egypt: He wants an end to Egypt’s crony capitalist state, which allowed Hosni Mubarak [...]

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Mike Konczal makes a great point about the value of losing well in the financial regulatory reform fight and setting the table for future fights and wins. The whole post is worth a read, especially in contrast to his critique of how the administration has lost some fights poorly. But this conclusion stands out in [...]

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