Bernie Sanders
Related: About this forumNoam Chomsky: Electing the President of the Empire
OK--let's prove Chomsky wrong on this!
http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/34516-focus-noam-chomsky-electing-the-president-of-the-empire
Abby Martin: Theres this huge amount of grassroots energy, donations, around getting people elected who are believed to be able to give us solutions to the problems that we face now. What do you think we should be focusing our energy on?
Noam Chomsky: Take, say, the Bernie Sanders campaign, which I think is important, impressive. Hes doing good and courageous things. Hes organizing a lot of people. That campaign ought to be directed to sustaining a popular movement that will use the election as a kind of an incentive and then go on, and unfortunately its not. When the elections over, the movement is going to die. And thats a serious error.
The only thing thats going to ever, ever bring about any meaningful change is ongoing, dedicated, popular movements that dont pay attention to the election cycle. Its an extravaganza every four years. You have to be involved in it, so fine. Well be involved in it, but then we go on. If that were done, you could get major changes.
Proserpina
(2,352 posts)No, it's not going to die...it is the latest incarnation of Occupy, which was the natural child of civil rights and women's rights movements.
The only way it's gonna die is if Hillary "wins" the nomination by non-democratic means. At that point, I'd invest in pitchforks, because the 1% will have pulled out all the stops.
zazen
(2,978 posts)Maybe they're waiting until after the primary, depending on whether he wins (which is quite possible to me). But we absolutely need a "50 state strategy" to elect officials at all levels who are committed to economic democracy, working in concert with community efforts at co-op like business enterprises, anchor institutions, that sort of thing, already underway like those described by Gar Apervowitz.
This is far too much to fall on the shoulders of one person. The mainstream media are not bringing out any experts to talk about progressive economics/democratic socialism--the huge public conversation we need to be having, that is certainly touched upon by Michael Moore (in a non-electoral setting).
Chomsky's right that it's getting tied up in the POTUS circus and that we need a larger more driven and organized conversation and action agenda on this. It's possible that Sanders (and well his campaign is pretty busy) wouldn't want to begin organizing this the way Dean did (who was simply organizing a response to negation of Bush era neoconservatism), because it'd look like he's going outside the Democratic party.
There are former elected officials who could be interviewed on this--progressive senators/reps who were pushed out by DNC types. But of course, radio silence.